100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I think cable providers should be left out. They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. They can just use the free money they've already been given. Instead, the funding should go to existing munipical fiber ISPs to expand their coverage. Give money to people with a proven track record of doing what you want, not people with a proven track record of keeping the money for themselves.
I'm on municipal fiber and it's amazing.
I mean they could but they wont, and there was no reason to with Ajit Pai running the place. I daresay they'll have to be sued into compliance to do it now. Not that I object to that: they need to refund the taxpayers' money or do what they promised with it.
plus interest.
https://www.androidauthority.com/where-is-5g-available-in-th...
There are still large pockets of the US on data caps as low as 10gb. Throttled connections. Asymmetric networks. All so we can be nickel and dimed to death on fees, privilege, bundles, and in some cases double paying for content.
I think you mean an oligopoly.
This problem goes back WAY farther than Ajit Pai.
those all represent far more fundamental human needs than communication.
In contrast, food can be shipped in to a city from innumerable farms, ditto for clothing. Home construction, there's lot of different home builders around, it's not a natural monopoly like communication.
For food production, I don't really have to trust any particular two or three farming companies -- if they fuck up, food can be shipped in from elsewhere. Whereas if my local ISP's are exploitative or simply incompetent, what's my recourse?
Internet service is seen as something in the same league as roads, power, water, and other utilities. Things that require public rights of way, extensive digging, cooperations among many jurisdictions or land owners, and special rules to make it all possible.
Clothing, food, and construction are all businesses that don't require that level of centralized coordination. Anyone can open their own bakery, or buy a farm. Anyone can set up sewing machines and purchase fabric, or get a contractors' license and start nailing sticks of wood together. Government still sets standards, of course. But these businesses don't have inherent monopolies the same way infrastructure businesses do.
Very little government money has been spent on broadband. Federal funding for broadband dates back only to the Obama administration. And cable companies have largely not received this money. You’re thinking of something else.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556
I just realized that you were posting on that thread as well.
We tend to think of both of them as just “broadband” today, but the regulatory structure is totally different. The central premise of the notion that telephone companies received “billions of dollars from the government” is that the government lifted rate regulation on telephone companies in the 1990s. Rate regulation told the companies what they could charge for local phone service. The argument is that phone companies made $200 billion more than they would have had had those regulations remained in place.
I disagree with that assertion for phone companies, as addressed in the thread above. But even on its own merits that argument is not applicable to cable companies. Cable companies weren’t rate regulated (except that in some places there is a regulated minimum television service they must provide at a government-specified price). There was no government action in the 1990s that contemplated subsidies to create incentives for cable companies to build fiber.
> AT&T and CenturyLink accepted all funding for all states for which they accepted CAF funding. For AT&T, seventh year CAF funding totals approximately $427 million for 18 states. For CenturyLink, the total seventh year funding totals approximately $503 million for 33 states.
Over 7 years, AT&T has received half a billion dollars from the feds. That’s not a lot of money for building fiber. In rural high cost areas, where that money is supposed to be targeted, that might be like 20,000 homes. AT&T spends over $10 billion per year on wireline upgrades and maintenance: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/at-t-dedicates-40-40b-... ($16 billion in 2017). Over that 7 year period you’re talking $100+ billion in investment from AT&T versus $0.5 billion from the feds. Do you see why that money hasn’t moved the needle at all?
To my knowledge, Comcast has never received universal service fund (now called the connect America fund) money.
We can argue about whether universal service money has been used efficiently. But the idea that companies like Comcast received billions of dollars from the feds to build fiber everywhere is a very Trumpian misrepresentation (taking something with a tiny grain of truth and spinning it into a tall tale).
“On October 27, 2011, the FCC approved a six-year transfer process that would transition the money from the Universal Service Fund High-Cost Program into the new $4.5 billion a year Connect America Fund, effectively putting an end to the USF High-Cost Fund by 2018.“
“In March 2014, the FCC approved "Phase II" of the transition to the Connect America Fund, adding $1.8 billion a year in funding.”
What’s important to realize is these subsides ends up providing paying customers to these companies. As such they don’t need to cover 100% of the cost of connections only the subset of that cost that wouldn’t be covered by monthly fees.
For the most part the money never materialized. The Phase II support, for example, ended up being just $1.49 billion over 10 years, not $1.8 billion per year as in your quote: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/connect-america-fund-ph...
It doesn't matter if the subsidies cover 100% of the costs or not--the point is that the funding is a tiny fraction of what the industry already spends, and isn't enough to move the needle outside a small number of very high-cost rural places. The replacement for the connect America Fund, the Rural Broadband Opportunity Fund, plans to distribute $20 billion over a decade: https://thecounter.org/fcc-20-billion-dollar-rural-broadband.... (Again, plans.) Wireline providers invest about $40 billion annually--or around $400 billion over the next decade.
The notion that subsidies are more than a drop in the bucket (and should be expected to significantly move the needle on broadband deployment) is just false.
In the associated April 2014 Connect America Report and Order, the Commission decided that a competitive ETC that is awarded “support through the competitive bidding process will cease to receive legacy phase-down support for those specific areas upon commencement of Connect America Phase II support.”12 As of July 1, 2014, consistent with the USF/ICC Transformation Order, the Commission froze fixed competitive ETCs’ legacy support at 60%...
Also, wireline providers don’t invest $40 billion per year in extending their networks to new customers. The majority of that money is spent on maintaining and upgrading existing equipment as part of their normal operating costs. It’s like complaining they can’t simply get money without doing anything.
They might have some excuses with the amps, but again, those can be upgraded as they age out/die too. This was the excuse 20 years ago when the amps didn't allow any upstream signals through in many areas. If a cable company hasn't been preparing/slowly rolling out new equipment as soon as the specs are available that is their own fault. Like any other technology you either get on the train, or you get left behind.
Fiber doesn't have this constraint. It's trivial (and common) to deploy a pair to each premise, but, even if you don't want to do that you can shine light in both directions on the same piece of glass and reasonably* run a terabit across a single fiber (not a pair).
All components through out the network rely on what came before.
That said, fiber is really really efficient and can put 100 customers utilizing the entire 100m on one strand.
Business class in airlines -- goes the same place as coach, but "the service is better". Actually what they've done ist o mindfully take away from coach to stimulate upgrades to business class.
I signed up for business internet just so I could get a static ip address. Other internet services like sonic will give you a static address if you ask.
Make the loan be equally competitive - any company can apply for any amount of money, and a small amount of the loan is forgiven per user they bring above the 100/100 mark (with possibly a bonus to rural users). Any backbone infrastructure created with these loans needs to be peerable as well.
I don't think the money has to go to municipal fiber though. I'm currently in a rural city running 1Gbps/1Gbps with no data caps because of a small company got extra funding.
In the rare markets with actual competition the shitty cable companies provide at least okay service. In Palo Alto I can get 1gbps down/35mbps up on Comcast for $89 (with 1TB data cap I have to pay $50 extra to remove).
That's not too bad.
They also offer a 2gbps down and up service called gigabit pro, but it requires installation and it's pretty expensive: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comc.... It's also hard to get because the reps on the phone are not well trained and don't know about it.
This is only because there are a few internet options here. Where I grew up there is one provider (Spectrum, was Time Warner, and Adelphia before that), the service is bad and the price is at least double.
I recently moved to SF and I'm in a newer building with Google Fiber Webpass, it's 1gbps down and up with no cap for $57/month - it's awesome.
The worst part about Comcast (ignoring the 35mbps up which is pretty bad) is everything around the service. Their website is extremely hostile. It's impossible to do anything online. Their pricing is heavily obscured. They push shitty TV packages I don't want or care about. It's hard to cancel without going through retention.
Google Webpass? I signed up online in 5min, connected my own equipment and was good to go.
Hopefully with real competition the old services will either get competitive or die. I don't really care which.
Most of Europe seems to be moving to this kind of model:
A cable TV provider using DOCSIS or FTTH (and expanding their footprint)
Existing incumbent telco providing service via VDSL/FTTH (rapidly rolling out FTTH)
New "altnets" (as they are called here) doing new build FTTH (like webpass in the US, but they are not just aimed at apartment buildings).
This has led to really significant competition. In portugal I have access to at least 1 FTTH and DOCSIS3.1. In London the same, my last flat actually had the option of 2 seperate FTTH providers (not sharing infrastructure) plus DOCSIS based cable.
I think the altnets are the key to forcing investment by the otherwise duopolistic incumbent telcos and cable companies.
I think what the FCC should be looking at is how to allow altnets to roll out service quicker. There is so much state/municipal legislation that I imagine that is the main blocker of doing this at scale.
It's entirely possible for them to just ignore starlink. Due to the nature of satellite internet there's only so high a density of customers that they can have. At maximum theoretical efficiency and distribution this is maybe 1% of US households. In cities it will be irrelevant (starlink will either raise prices or turn away customers), in rural areas it may serve as some competition, but infrastruture investment in those areas is naturally lower return than in cities, so they're not likely to have a strong incentive to improve their service there. Elon Musk has specifically said Starlink is not competition for the big telcos.
StarLink beta welcome email just arrived and I’m counting the days till I cancel Spectrum completely
This is how you know they arent really concerned about competition. This level of service is probably not quite a profitable because they likely cant oversubscribe their GPON nodes as aggressively with customers on that tier. The only other explanation is they dont care they are leaving money on the table.
In my area comcast is $89 for 200/10. And I live in an area with a significantly lower COL than Palo Alto.
I have to monitor my network for bandwidth usage and recently had to revert back to sneakernet for offsite backups because i was routinely approaching the data cap.
The only other option is CenturyLink DSL at like 5Mbps/768Kbps...
Starlink is available and frankly im considering it out of spite. I canceled cable and have the rare unbundled comcast plan. I could easily run dual ISP's for a while and be around what I was paying for cable TV and if starlink pan's out....i can just axe comcast.
But a 40ms first hop may not be tenable. Not sure.
I definitely dont live in a large city. But its not really the boonies either.
I called and asked the guy if it was available, he said not in my area and they'd contact me when it was. This seemed wrong since I'd read it was available (and I guess he was just lying about contacting me?).
I called back and got a new guy, he said it was available but 'installation' was $300. This seemed wrong.
I tried a third time, this guy said I was confused and the word 'gigabit' didn't exist - I must be talking about the 'gigabyte data cap'. I begged him to click around his screen and look for gigabit service. He did and finally found it, "first I've seen this". I asked this guy about gigabit pro and he said it didn't exist.
I'd since switched to using comcast twitter to get someone at least moderately competent when I want something (they know about gigabit pro). Thankfully now I don't have to use them at all.
They are insanely difficult to buy stuff from.
During all those calls they keep pushing TV packages and get upset when I say no thank you. When I called to cancel they kept pushing promotional rates and asking me not to cancel. Even though my new service is less than half price, uncapped and has 30x more upload.
All that said, when the service itself is running it at least works pretty much all the time without issue.
Because god help you if you need to reach out. It will be frustrating and painful and there is no escalation option.
Honestly I get better results just going through the Better Business Bureau. It literally solved my last line down issue faster that way that the empty promises from their call center robots
I fear that data caps for home internet will become standard. There is no technological reason for these caps. For wireless, they could be defended by arguing that companies only get to use so much spectrum because of FCC laws. But the only limit for home internet is the ISP's willingness to deploy equipment and install cable/fiber runs. That's exactly what customers are paying them to do.
> Imagine how good [most policies] would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian.
The ages of the senators proposing this are 76 (Joe Manchin), 76 (Angus King), 65 (Rob Portman), and 56 (Michael Bennet). 3 of the 4 are older than the median Senator age.
None of the 4 are in the youngest 25%.
Image how good our opinions of the Senate would be if we based them in facts.
Of the individuals you named, only Manchin has any chairmanships.
And again, this demonstrates that mocking old people as somehow the problem is factually unsupportable by the facts.
The process of bringing a bill to vote in committee or in session is not nearly as democratic as you imagine.
Since residential connects are over subscribed anyway, it is trivial to make users throttle during peak demand based on their current/historical usage.
If you use Cloudflare's costs and peering:transit ration from 2014 (which is almost certainly cheaper now); 1Mbps/month costs $8. [1]
1 Mbps/month is ~329GBytes. A 1TB data cap would be just ~3.1 Mbps/month costing $24.8.
I'd estimate that a last mile ISP could probably get an effective rate of half or less since connecting to end users/consumers is an advantage. And in a lot of cases, the same ISP offering residential service is also selling transit to other networks so in a way the data is already paid for by the time it reaches your local ISP.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...
Revenue is easy: how much did you take in for video? phone? Internet access?
Costs are harder because you can only include business line direct costs. Since the cable plant is used by voice, video and data services it's not a direct cost of any of them. Same thing with the service vehicle fleet, call centers, etc. Most things get saddled in "administration" categories and obscure the true cost of providing the service. As a company overall, their margins been hovering around 8-12%.
Do you have a source stating otherwise?
Like 40% of the segment cost is "programming" (TV), so the internet part of the service likely has even better operating margin than the segment overall (basically, slightly higher revenue than TV with considerably lower costs).
If the network is more heavily used, it will require more capacity where it connects to other parts of the network or other networks. More ports and more wires means more failures of ports and wires and more diagnosis of ports and wires and more replacement of ports and wires.
Or, if capacity is not increased to meet demand, you need more people at the callcenter to ignore customer complaints.
If it's underutilized, you can save money by delaying replacement.
Let's keep things simple and say in one interconnect you'e got 4x 10G ports. If your utilization peaks at 5 Gbps, you way overbuilt that connection, but if one port breaks, you don't need to fix it until another port breaks; you can wait until three out of four ports are broken if you feel lucky. That delays hardware replacement and eliminates service trips and probably reduces technician time. If that connection peaks at 35 Gbps, you should fix any issues ASAP. (And start planning for capacity increases).
Of course, if the connection is to another network, they may bill for usage too; although I'm pretty sure US dominant ISPs are not paying for usage on most of their connections.
This is totally out of the minimum requirement area.
The place where ISPs skimp is between the home and the DC where the monopoly is.
I‘m so glad I have a local fiber provider.
I would focus less on the age of the Senators and more on the fact that your median voter is 50 years old. And your median primary voter is 58 years old. They also consume significantly more television (and less Internet) than people under 40 (Millennials and Gen-Z).
AOC seems like she understands the massive reach and power of the internet...she chided Dems for under-spending on online ads and went after Zuckerberg for not deleting false content. She's not even a technologist and she "gets" technology more than many who have much more experience. Don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly in awe of her or anyone else in Congress...just clarifying that it does indeed seem that the young ones understand technology's impact on society far better than the old ones.
As for data caps, those are basically unnecessary in a 5g world and were never necessary for wireline service. The necessary of caps prior to 5g is debatable. Data caps were always just an excuse for ISPs to charge more.
Dude that would be such a nightmare-world. Imagine life without techno remixes of Senator Ted Stevens. Teh horror!
-regulating ISPs as a free market is, to be hyperbolic, a disaster. there is effectively a monopoly in most parts of the country.
-25/3 Mbps is a very reasonable speed for most people. the issue is that its provided on a best effort basis that is never maintained for long, if at all. netflix says thats enough to stream UHD[0]
-FTA: "Those data points likely undercount the number of unserved Americans because the FCC lets ISPs count an entire census block as served even if it can serve just one home in the block" hilarious - what else is there to say.
-FTA: "The senators are also frustrated by differing standards across agencies. [...] the FCC defines [...] Alternatively, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines" why is this the federal government's job again? the internet is clearly not an enumerated power. is this the interstate commerce clause that keeps on giving in action again? i think decentralizing federal power would help alleviate a lot of the existential dread vis a vi corruption that many americans are feeling.
all in all, this reeks of regulatory capture to me. if we're gonna have a serious discussion about internet infrastructure, i think the starting point is how we classify ISPs and where in the city-state-federal hierarchy the responsibility lies. changing a 25 to a 100 is a cool bullet on a resume, but i dont think this is the low handing fruit here.
> all in all, this reeks of regulatory capture to me. if we're gonna have a serious discussion about internet infrastructure, i think the starting point is how we classify ISPs and where in the city-state-federal hierarchy the responsibility lies. changing a 26 to a 100 is a cool bullet on a resume, but i dont think this is the low handing fruit here.
The distributed regulation is the biggest problem IMO. ISPs are generally granted explicit or effective monopolies by local governments. Local competition is difficult enough for a utility business, but city governments make it effectively impossible in many places. Then there's a few big players who are able to claim competition and get lenient regulation at the federal level.
Granting ISPs explicit monopolies has been illegal since the 1992 cable act. Show me a franchise agreement that has an exclusivity provision. They’re public documents.
On the other side of the scale, Google Fiber has had the carpet rolled out for it in many places, for example being given for example free leases to public property for installing fiber huts: https://techliberation.com/2012/08/07/what-google-fiber-says...
> Google received stunning regulatory concessions and incentives from local governments, including free access to virtually everything the city owns or controls: rights of way, central office space, power, interconnections with anchor institutions, marketing and direct mail, and office space for Google employees. City officials also expedited the permitting process and assigned staff specifically to help Google. One county even offered to allow Google to hang its wires on parts of utility poles – for free – that are usually off-limits to communications companies.
See also: https://hbr.org/2018/09/why-google-fiber-is-high-speed-inter...
> But we believe Google Fiber’s most significant impact was to change the nature of relations between infrastructure providers and local authorities. Even after substantial deregulation in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and even as separate networks and technologies converged on a single internet-based standard, local governments continued to treat network providers as quasi-governmental public utilities, regulating their construction efforts and access to public rights of way with cumbersome procedures developed decades earlier.
One of the biggest examples of special treatment Google has negotiated in almost every Fiber city is exemption from build-out requirements: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-google-fiber-launch...
> Google Fiber has started with three neighborhoods in Louisville--Portland, Newburg, and Strathmoor (better known as the Highlands, where all the young professionals hang out). Residents of those neighborhoods can start ordering the service today by going to google.com/fiber/louisville. There are two packages to choose from:
While focusing on higher income neighborhoods where more people are likely to sign up for service seems like a no brainer in fact it’s an explosive political in most cities. That was the exact reason Verizon wasn’t allowed to deploy FiOS to Baltimore, and was a major reason for delays in FiOS deployment for NYC.
Looking at the details of how Google approached Fiber in various cities is a roadmap for what’s holding back deployment across the country. The problem was not incumbent lobbying—cities like Baltimore were falling over themselves to get Google to build Fiber. But what Google demanded in every fiber city was the sort of thing it got in Kansas City: elimination of the red tape that drives up costs. It’s no surprise that Google ended up mainly building Fiber in a bunch of red state cities.
starlink is changing that, as these articles and letters are being written.
Beaming internet from space solves a ton of problems for anyone out at the ends of rural copper, or using p2p systems, or where there simply isn't another alternative.
But using myself as an example, I live in a part of NYC where there is fiber internet in the street in front of my building - and my landlord has zero obligation to allow the 60-ish apartments in the building to access it. We're stuck on legacy cable, which has abysmal upload speeds and congestion issues.
The dense urban or suburban environments theoretically have more options, but thats not always reality... and I'm not sure that tens of millions of people replacing their local ISP with satellite is desirable, or even technically viable. New provider options are important, but making sure access to the existing options is equitable and reasonable (across all the various local governments, providers, middlemen, etc) is important too.
What I hope to see from Starlink is some freedom for more knowledge workers to work remotely, as in more rural communities.
> So will Starlink be a good option for anyone in the United States? Not necessarily. Musk said there will be plenty of bandwidth in areas with low population densities and that there will be some customers in big cities. But he cautioned against expecting that everyone in a big city would be able to use Starlink.
...
> "I want to be clear, it's not like Starlink is some huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear it is not," Musk said. "In fact, it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with... cell towers."
> Starlink will likely serve the "3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos" and "people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad," Musk said. "So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos."
From https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
Except most household have more than 1 person. A family of four sharing 100Mbps isn't a lot.
I am not sure if 100Mbps upload is a realistic option in US. But I would at least expect 50Mbps to be minimum per household. DOSCIS 4.0 should be able to handle that.
DOCSIS 4.0 was ( finally ) finalised last year. And could be pushed for upgrading. But that is just the last mile, Cable companies will still have to ensure fibre roll out. Look at UK. They had a half decent infrastructure with DSL and could have pushed G.Fast, instead they just bite the bullet and pushed FTTP to maximum.
Although technically I was only upgraded from 100 to 200 for free a few years ago because a competitor came in since then with fiber who offers 200/200 at the same price. I haven't switched over because they cut me a deal and truthfully I don't upload enough for the extra amount to matter and I get single digit ping times out of my provider which I'm happy with.
Yes, for one person.
Having lived with a family fo 4 using ADSL, it was not fun when 3 people watched Netflix on their own screens, and having to update a game.
Or with the pandemic and WFH, you have maybe 4 people using DSL for Teams/Skype/Zoom meetings and trying to work/study at the same time.
streaming netflix in HD instead of UHD is 5mbps. 5x3=15, leaving 10 free to download a game. pretty reasonable. the pain was likely that you didnt have a real 25meg pipe, or that there was latency or jitter. a true 25Mbps would have been enough.
> the pandemic and WFH
I think you could make a strong argument that 3meg up is no longer sufficient. we live in an era where duo, facetime, and conference call programs and ubiquitous.
i do not, however, think you could make the argument that changing the download Mbps target from 25 to 100 is the best way to spend billions of dollars in a market that no one would accuse of being saturated and highly competitive.
Even ignoring the "more than one person" issue, 3Mbps makes it very difficult to do things like file transfers and backups and accessing home data from elsewhere.
25/10 per person is a much better minimum bar than 25/3
> all in all, this reeks of regulatory capture to me.
Why? How does this favor entrenched players over newcomers?
The companies I see being disadvantaged by this are incumbent cable companies that need to update equipment to let more frequencies be shifted from download to upload. But that's not regulatory capture by ISPs and should have good effects. And this doesn't seem like some kind of incumbent ISP vs. incumbent ISP regulatory capture either.
Please expand upon your point. Why exactly is 25/3 reasonable for most people? I'm not necessarily disagreeing; indeed, this would be a god-level speed compared to what's currently standard for most of Latin America. However, your point about Netflix is irrelevant because not every use case can be buffered. Also, many use cases in our new work-from-home reality require better up speed than 3Mbps with bad ping and high jitter.
nothing special about netflix, just a service that most people use. even their highest quality offering is streamable if we actually got advertised speeds. just trying to say that 25 isnt a meaningful cap for most people.
> require better up speed than 3Mbps with bad ping and high jitter
rejectfinite makes this point downthread and i agree with both of you. i think theres a lot more bang for your buck to be had by reducing quality problems and widening the upload pipe.
100Mbps download so that multiple people can simultaneously stream 4k video is not a sane default.
Remote work has become very much A Thing since the COVID lockdown. Solid upload/download bandwidth isn't about streaming multiple 4K movies. It's about productivity where a sketchy 3Mbps connection is a hurdle.
It is if you don't want to update the minimum every 5 years. 100 isn't even high enough, IMO. It should be at least 500 down and at least 100 up to be safe for another decade, maybe 2.
If the pandemic has shown most of the world anything, it's that people need internet with high speeds. With the increasing gap between rich and poor, there are more people in flat shares too (per flat and total flat shares). Houses are bought later, if at all.
Yes it is because this is how many people already live. If you’re a typical family of four everyone has at least one device they stream content on.
I have 50/20 in Australia on VDSL2, and it is just barely good enough for this. You're right about it not being consistent/maintained though. Some days I could collab remotely no worries, other days it was simply impossible.
No, 3 megabits upload is not reasonable. If people have to work from home or school from home the 3 megabits upload quickly becomes too little for a google meet/teams video chat or screensharing.
It becomes even worse if multiple family members have to do it at the same time.
I have commercial (ie high priority), 600Mbit/120Mbit broadband with extremely stable (under 15ms, over 99% of th time) round trip to most of the Poland, for equivalent of 20 USD per month.
I know its not the same everywhere in Poland, but consider I also have three mobile internet plans. One of them is 4G limited to 20Mbit but unlimited monthly transfer, for 5 USD per month. This is also quite stable and allows me to comfortably work remotely from almost every place in Poland and serves me as a backup link.
You could replace that with a lot of things unfortunately. If you put "and expensive" at the end, it would probably be just as correct.
I literally hate going to the doctor because the various billing departments are often nightmares to deal with.
My insurance and medical provider are the same entity, which I thought was supposed to avoid this exact situation.
Now I just avoid any medical treatment unless it is completely unavoidable, because I have absolutely no trust that the costs won't just be suddenly upgraded afterwords.
(1) Poland is a LOT smaller than the United States. It's not much bigger than the state of Wyoming, yet it has more than 60x the population. That makes building infrastructure a lot cheaper and more profitable.
(2) The US had the Internet FIRST. That's not an advantage when it comes to infrastructure. For example, England had roads hundreds of years before the US did, so roads in the United States are quite a bit better. Rome had running water (of a sort) a long time before most anywhere else but I'll bet its water situation today is quite a bit worse on average than most of the United States.
There are parts of the US that have similar or higher population density to poland or other european countries. There are no reason they cant get as good internet. Not all ISP's have to cover the entire country.
I have a better explanation, and it is just greedy companies that invest absolute minimum into infrastructure, oversubscribe their internet access and pioneered worst possible customer service just because the customers have no other option.
It is not just developed economies /rich countries only either. I have 1 GBps Fiber for roughly 20 USD a month in Bangalore, India .
Population density has a lot to do with internet speeds more than anything else, EU has roughly half the size and double the population.
If you drive out of a populated area across the US, nearly all of it is very sparsely populated, and therefore has terrible internet. 18% of Americans live in these areas, and that’s 54 million people. That’s a lot of frustrated individuals! Even in more populated rural areas like Ohio, you might get cable (but not fiber) to the nearest village, but even a half mile out of town, it’s only DSL (6mbps down on a good day).
A community that has 1 home with 1Gb/s and 10 homes with 5Mb/s would have an average speed of about (1000 + (10*5))/11 = 95 Mb/s, which is accurate but misleading
Internet service is almost static once installed; fiber lasts for decades (barring visits from backhoes) and the networking equipment can be fairly centralized and doesn't cost a lot to keep the lights on. It's insane that ISPs charge the rates that they do. Multi-mode SFPs are $50, switches are low thousands for enterprise grade, a couple long range 100G SFPs are another thousand. $50/month * 48 ports in a neighborhood pays that off pretty fast.
Fiber can't be any harder to install than fluid-filled pipes or electrical cables.
Any chance I could ask you a few questions about internet access in Denmark? I'm working towards some local improvements here in the U.S. and curious to get some more data points.
If you email me at hnPotterTheOtter ~ gmail it will go to my normal email address.
There was talks about upgrading to 10gbit/10gbit for 30$, since the infrastructure can deliver that, but since consumer hardware is still stuck at 1gbit it was postponed until there's actually a market for it
Any chance I could ask you a few questions about internet access in Denmark? I'm working towards some local improvements here in the U.S. and curious to get some more data points.
If you email me at hnPotterTheOtter ~ gmail it will go to my normal email address.
I hope you realize that the US is not uniform as a single entity, because I live here, and I can also say "hi from the developed world", given I have at least 2 providers here willing to give me symmetrical 1000Mbps up/down for $50-70 with no data caps (and I have been using one of them for the past 2 years and couldn't be happier). But this is far from being the case everywhere in the US.
Improving internet for America outside of the cities means investing in the infrastructure to upgrade it. It also means outlawing the data cap scam and banning ISPs from overselling their bandwidth because high speed internet is useless if you can't actually use it. Its the same principle as banning junk health insurance plans that are useless when you actually need medical care: fraud should be illegal even if it "saves some people some money".
We are basically a giant Lan party since the 2000's and should get a Netflix special/documentary with this script:
https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2ct58s/average_inter...
They also didn't say anything about data caps, though there could be something in the contracts. I don't read Romanian myself and the PDFs of the contracts are time-consuming to manually reformat and feed into Google Translate. (Text selection goes across the page, not down each column, so it interleaves the columns.) But those minimum speeds—which BTW are guaranteed in the contracts—and no data caps would imply an oversubscription rate of only 4-5x.
One question to ask would be whether they are getting a subsidy to provide service at those rates. The subscriber might not be paying the full cost, or at least not up front.
I doubt they have any.
Main reasons for such a good network and low prices: low income and piracy, which fueled a giant "duct-taped" Lan infrastructure some 20 years ago, with ISP's at every corner, which were then bought because the infrastructure was already there.
See the link in my other comment here for a better explanation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
Moral of the story - latency and roundtrips are the devil and some users have it extra bad, but if you make it work for them, it's going to be amazing for everyone else too.
See https://www.pcmag.com/news/fcc-has-serious-doubts-spacex-sta... for an example.
So, it might be that the senators aren't pushing that because the FCC has already been on the ball for latency, and pushing to keep latencies down around 30-40ms
My other option is DSL with Att, a max of like 30Mbps down...
If it’s slow uploading photos, support can sell them on upgrading to the next highest plan to ‘go faster’ - congrats your uplink speed is now 5mbs instead of 3mbs isn’t as impressive as ‘we upgraded you to 1gig!’.
The only folks who know to ask and care about upload speeds already know Comcast is terrible, and are going to try to figure any way to avoid them.
Imagine if people could just buy a premade raspi that hosted their social media page, ddns, etc.
Home of capitalism!
Sorry to hear that.
For 100Mbps you could run about 50 Zooms simultaneously. Who does that?
Unless you are massively uploading (likely illegal content) who needs greater than 10Mbps upstream at home?
The current ISP setup is based on a consumer only model of the internet which benefits the big corps and stifles anyone trying to actually DO anything but consume.
For residential, Comcast only advertises download speed, leaving upload speed like 1996.
Comcast has a bad reputation but there is only 1 ISP available to my address. No competition.
It's ok for video streaming and conference calls. And I guess that's the minimal threshold. But with more and more services and offerings in the cloud, especially iCloud that just happily backs-up data out of the box and OneDrive 1TB corporate plan it's not going to win any awards.
With the pandemic and the changes in work from home habits, if I was a small town mayor I'd be rolling out fiber right now like there's no tomorrow. Big upfront costs but it instantly boosts the value of every property covered and attracts a new demographic that's not tied to any specific geographic location. Even with folks doing part time work from home, the additional time spent in the town during work days means that commercial real-estate will appreciate as well.
Easy as that.
They can always borrow, and make up for it in higher property taxes.
It reports two additional providers that won't actually make the installation. I've tried.
Charter only.
[1] - https://www.fcc.gov/information-required-when-filing-informa...
Now, I have 10000/10000 symmetrical fiber which sets me back ~$45/month.
This article (and discussion) make me feel privileged :)
Keep that in mind the next time you pay your monthly bill for AT&T/Time Warner/Comcast/Verizon. They could’ve given you gigabit speeds the entire time.
And use consistent scales. MiB =/= MB, and 100Mbps means 12.5 MB/s.
I forget what plan I pay for with my cable provider but I just tested to 200 Megabit down and 18 up. That sounds low compared to numbers people throw around here but in reality my wife and I are able to Zoom or stream at the same time, browse in parallel and basically never feel any impact of latency. Basically, everything we want to do in real time works in real time and anything large I want to download (eg: linux ISOs) takes just a few seconds. Whatever numbers we are throwing around for comparison just don't seem to be practical concerns.
We're in NYC. With COVID, my coworkers scattered all over the US - east, west and south. Nobody put in a particular effort to look for places based on connectivity quality and yet everyone is able to WFH fine. Everyone moved to either be close to family, to a warmer client, or to skiing and the mountains. And yet somehow everyone ended up with great connectivity that allows us to seamlessly run a large and successful firm.
It's just funny to hear people complain about how bad things are when in reality everything works mainly fine. Like - really - what are you actually unable to do? (I am genuinely curious)
My internet bill is $38 in NYC by the way. RCN cable.
One final thing - it's nonsensical for people to say "I have X connectivity and I am in a Central European village." Obviously... the us installed its infrastructure before you did and it works well enough so we're not going to tear it out and replace it for no reason. You didn't have connectivity until much later so of course you're currently using newer technology. At some point we'll have to upgrade ours and leap ahead of you again.
Exactly, this conversation is about how terrible internet is when you aren’t in the most densely populated urban areas. Yes, it’s mostly fine in cities and even ok inside some small towns. It’s usually terrible when you live outside of the small-town city limits and not on a state highway.
> and it works well enough so we’re not going to tear it out
Your 200Mbps connection is definitely not on original infrastructure. For the 50 million plus people living with DSL connections which get barely 6mbps download on a good day, they would not agree that the older infra we have “works fine”. I know many people with this story because I’m from a part of the country like that — drive across America, and you’ll see that nearly everywhere is very sparsely populated. That covers a lot of people! You might be able to experience this yourself eventually if you go on a road trip and stay at a hotel not in a large city.
I don’t think it’s nonsensical to suggest that the US could also be building out a nationwide fiber network, and I think we should be striving towards that.
How am meant to backup my pc? Might as well send my data on Sd card by post.
Is this the same ratio in the US? My friends in mainland Europe seem to have much more symmetrical up/down streams
Something like 10/5 is considered "fast enough".
Numbers and units exist for a reason. If one wish to speak of 100 Mib/s, then one should simply do so. — that way, I, and everyone else, knows exactly what is going on.
Oh, no that's too big for them to email to their antiquated consultants, turns out they want 15MiB max video clips.
Well to do that I had to step down to 720/30. Which they then complained wasn't clear enough for their uses. Three rounds of RFI later I'm back as square one, they've defined HD as 1080/60 and they say they'll figure out how to distribute the clips. Just annoying as all get out when they could have started with clear language (numbers) to begin with.
It's a bit like doubling your salary and increasing your spending by more than double. That seems to be how website and app development behaves.
Imagine if bandwidth increased, latency decreased (approaching theoritical minimums), and websites/apps were built with a strict (but appropriately flexible) network budget.
Perhaps the best catchphrase here is "weakest link".
Even with 500+ mbps up and down, and pihole blocking a lot of ads, and noscript blocking some analytics and other trackers, a lot of web experiences are underwhelming.
Also, the recent fascinating post about how someone sped up GTA 5 online illustrates how the weakest link can be so weak that it ruins everything.
Far from it.