AT&T lobbies against nationwide fiber, says 10Mbps uploads are good enough
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
How is that for imagination and vision. Thank God it's not their call.
It's forever youtube unless users can be empowered with the ability to stream. Right now, the barrier to entry for streaming is huge. Starting off small to prove a concept or boostrap a streaming venture takes a lot of capital and knowledge. Simply increasing upload bandwidth at the home will open up the possibility of starting a business for many. These people have no vision.
I'm sure someone else can think of another beneficial knock-on effect or two beside users gaining the freedom to stream--uncensored.
Has a bad reputation because of copyright infringement but could be used to legally distribute patches. Some users could even get paid for keeping their machine on during off-hours and serving updates.
EDIT: Why the downvotes?
Big bandwidth users (0 day patch for games) might like buying less hardware and paying some users who have good bandwidth to distribute the patch.
I think you’re reading too much into it.
It reads a lot more like “we hear that you would like a better network, but we already make money. There’s no good reason to spend a lot of time, money and effort to build the same network most other developed countries are building when we get paid either way. I’m sure you understand. Just tell everyone else in the house to switch off their video calls when you want to play your game and it might work.”
The reason Starlink exists is most probably because they realised early on that not only could they build a useful product for rural users, but that building out wired/fiber networks was so expensive - and so marred in politics and lobbying - that traditional players have zero prospect of getting their act together in a way that would be competitive.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/starlink-already-thr...
not to contradict your point, but you can stream video just fine with 10Mbps of upload (twitch tops out at 6Mbps)
That country exists, and it's Australia.
I see billboards advertising 75 Mbps down like it's supposed to be blazing fast, it's a complete farce. Zoom calls are often more reminiscent of slideshows than an actual video call.
The Australian NBN project has been an abysmal failure, even after shifting the goalposts, they've been unable to kick any goals. The project has been consistently behind schedule, over budget, and delivered results below expectation.
Meanwhile, a short swim away in New Zealand, 84% of the population has access to fiber, with average speeds of 250 Mbps down (and up to 10 Gbps down in some areas). The UFB project may be the only government-led infrastructure project in history that has been delivered ahead of schedule and under budget.
I remember having a really fun time trying to get it when it was announced that it was available in my street, but my house was originally not part of that street when it was built, but part of the street behind it. As such the system didn't recognise my address as being part of that street which makes absolutely no sense. I had to wait another 6 months until it was rolled out to the street behind my house which was actually in a different suburb.
So, it wasn't perfect but we got there in the end!
For whatever reason, our contractor was taking forever to get around to finishing our install, so one day we found another bloke down the street doing an install, and gave him a box of beer to do a rush job for us.
Sorry.
AT&T's vision is to run commercials with Lily during every single break of every single game of the NCAA basketball tournament.
You'd think that with all that air time, AT&T would have made some effort to make the commercials mildly interesting, compelling or funny. Instead... boring, bland and idiotic.
> How is that for imagination and vision. Thank God it's not their call.
100/20Mbps ought to be enough for anyone.
Many households have 3-4 active concurrent users, using zoom or whatever.100/20 won't be close to enough
There are definitely cases in which a family would want more than 20, so I wouldn't call 20 more than enough. But it's certainly usable for the average family.
I've got three adults and I run a plex server for my family and my 25 mbit upload is only occasionally annoying.
It is usually the network quality for the uplink which creates problems, issues like packet loss, jitter, sudden b/w drops etc become more prominent, When the rated capacity is "20" we rarely get 20 consistently, it is "up to 20" with all that entails.
Imagine being that utterly useless and greedy. Telecom companies really are a special breed.
The problem is that utility companies are natural monopolies that aren't supposed to make profits and also many politicians now subscribe to a laissez-faire ideology that doesn't recognize that natural monopolies exist and that both regulating them and investing public funds in infrastructure in areas they'd neglect are legitimate and necessary functions of government. That's why we have a postmaster general who thinks the post office needs to turn a profit by providing worse service at a higher price who was put into his position by a politician who was supposedly elected by rural America to defend their interests. Infrastructure investment was what made America rich and great and letting it stagnate and crumble to protect short term corporate profits is what is causing this country's decline and opening the door for China's rise.
What did they do with the $100 million they got in 2013? There is a massive (10s of billions at this point) subsidy of internet expansion in the US with no apparent binding contract that has specified deliverables and defined punishment. It’s basically free money. Of course they’re going to pocket it. They probably drafted the bills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund#Connect...
It's what companies have been doing since St. Reagan of Hollywood blessed us with trickle-down economics.
God, bless you. I love this title for Mr. Trickles.
They are huge companies. They should be able to absorb a one-time big investment, come on.
Which was the original purpose of AT&T being a regulated monopoly: they were 'mandated' to build out telephone lines everywhere, but were allowed to raise prices in urban areas to help subsidize the cost. See also electrical utilities.
If we're not going to have The Market™ do things, then perhaps government should step in. Have the state or country run the fibre and handle ISO Layers 1 and 2, and then have ISPs handle things at Layer 3 (IP):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network
See UTOPIA Fiber in Utah:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Telecommunication_Open_In...
Provider: South Central Communications.
Gov. Cox ran a telecom company that helped work with UDOT on Utopia to whenever they have new construction just lay conduit which can be shared by telecoms. This was brilliant.
I'm not a fan of Cox for mishandling covid, being weak on masks, etc... but I'm damn thankful Utah is one state that got fiber right.
Telcos like AT&T can't even be bothered to offer decent internet to people in urban areas. Their best DSL offerings don't even meet the definition of broadband any more.
Oddly enough, once competition appears, their inability to build out a half decent network disappears.
>Time and time again, however, telecom has shown a willingness to compete on both price and service if a better municipal network pops up. Many cities with fiber networks are suddenly seeing massive investment from incumbent telecom providers—often, telecom will increase speeds and drop prices below cost. After Wilson, North Carolina built a fiber network, Time Warner Cable dropped rates within city limits and then, to subsidize the loss, it jacked up prices in neighboring communities, where it still had a monopoly. In Chattanooga, Comcast now offers 2 Gbps connections, which is faster internet than it offers anywhere else in the country.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ezpk77/chattanooga-gigabit-f...
Nineteen Ninety Six. (http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this....)
Instead you have things like this: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151022/09232532594/fcc-h...
"For example, the companies apparently paid $96,000 so that Hee could receive two-hour massages twice a week; $119,909 for personal expenses, including family trips to Disney World, Tahiti, France, and Switzerland and a four-day family vacation at the Mauna Lani resort; $736,900 for college tuition and housing expenses for Hee’s three children; $1,300,000 for a home in Santa Clara, California for his children’s use as college housing; and $1,676,685 in wages and fringe benefits for his wife and three children."
What is this crap from them? "Yeah that thing you have given us hundreds of billions to build over the past 25 years and billions of additional dollars every year, and subsidize rural people $50/month to pay us for, yeah, we aren't going to do it and oh yeah, taxpayer run systems are illegal in 22 states. https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc..."
They can screw off. Seize the industry and nationalize them. I'm so over it.
And I don't want to respond to any FUD about how governments, which have been able to pull this off years ago at a fraction of the cost in every other country "just can't do it" and how we need private industry, which has robbed us blind for a quarter century while failing to deliver is "the only solution". I do not practice your religious dedication to obviously broken systems and I don't care for you quoting liturgical verses from your favorite free market prophet. It's wrong, this is a giant unaccountable money hole. The only time we hear from them is when they need to make an excuse. Unless we are willing to fire them through nationalization they're utterly unaccountable.
Ultimately, everything is an interface between government and private industry. Unless we have government directly employ the people laying fiber in the ground, it's private contractors all around actually implementing this. Even in muni-broadband (of which I am almost universally a fan) private contractors do a bulk of the work. The only distinction is where the definition and interface between government and contract falls.
You can obviously give someone $400 billion dollars with a nebulous goal like "deploy broadband" or give someone smaller incremental chunks of money with smaller incremental goals, but, if you're not properly defining the goals and not properly scaling the money to the true benefit and the true work required you're getting poor money for value.
Ultimately, I think it speaks to something fundamentally broken about the interface between government and private contractors in the USA.
NBN Co. in Australia built our FTTN “National Broadband Network” by employing their own people. I’m pretty sure it’s majority government owned and run, if not wholly.
Everyone complains about NBN Co. and how slow they were but honestly they did a really good job. I think the complaints were amplified by journalists, looking for angry clicks.
(An amazing thing NBN Co. also did IMO was install pull-cables in every conduit, so future upgrades are significantly cheaper.)
So, instead of 95% of the population having gigabit fibre, we have this hodgepodge of FTTP, FTTN with the last hop over 5G, and FTTN with the last hop over copper, all of which cost the same and which you get depends on when it was installed.
Don’t get me wrong, the NBN is certainly better now than the ADSL of old, but it ended up costing significantly more for the mess we have now than it would’ve if we’d successfully seen FTTP through from the start.
Last time I lived in Aus the NBN was just being kicked off, and I remember it getting downgraded by the liberals. Has it just never caught up?
My area was supposed to get NBN in 2014 but I got it in 2020. I dont know how you would say its good with a 6 year delay.
Why would they do anything else?
The government also doesn’t have the expertise or equipment for fiber rollout at scale. If you want it fast you need contractors and that will not be cheap.
Mississippi has seen progress in building out internet infrastructure in the most under served rural areas by:
1.) Changing the law to enable the non-profit electrical coops set up under FDR's Rural Electrification Act to offer broadband service using Fiber to the Home.
2.) Taking some of the funding from the initial COVID relief funding and offering it as matching grants to those coops to get the ball rolling.
>How coronavirus stimulus funds helped one state create a 'broadband miracle'
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-stimulus-...
Did we? I believe there's a compelling case that we did not, or at least a solid argument about whether that's the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556
In my opinion, the killer feature at some point stops being throughput and becomes latency. On 80% of the web, loading a webpage will fetch 100 1kb file (I'm exaggerating), and it's way more important to have 15 ms latency to the servers serving those files than it is to have 100Mbps, 1Gbps or w/e throughput.
The fun fact is that fiber deployments are usually seriously improving latencies over copper ones which is what will get noticed when browsing casually.
So I wonder if the american congress could cheekily say "Sure, 100/20 is good enough as long as you ensure a 15ms roundtrip latency to any server located in the US...good luck with hawaii"
56k was enough for text, then came images, then came videos, then came 4K video. We’ll definitely find creative ways to saturate 1Gb connections eventually.
But emails will forever have tables.
When you do the maths, nothing is getting that big in fact, and when it does, either it's served by slow (both in bandwidth and latency) servers anyway, either it's time insensitive in the sense of "it will run over night". I never could for the life of me convince steam/epic/whatever to give me more than roughly 50MBps. I wish I could, but I suppose it's too expensive for them ? (or they don't have correct CDNs in Europe ? I don't know). Seriously, the only sites saturating my connections are... bandwidth checkers. Everything else seems to be happy with 1 to 10% of that.
So I'm very not convinced that we'll ever commonly fill 1Gb connection. Also our brains, the ultimate piece in the information transmission chain, can't really make sense of 1Gb of (correctly compressed and packed) information per second anyway. And this hardware part won't get upgraded soon.
OK, so you have two of those going and a twitch stream, someone's downloading a new game as well (and wants it now not in two hours), plus a bunch of other things going on... it adds up and it's good to have the burst capacity for large downloads when you want it.
> I never could for the life of me convince steam/epic/whatever to give me more than roughly 50MBps.
Did you mean bits or bytes there? 50 MBps == 400Mbps.
I regularly get several hundred Mbps out of the game services like steam here in the UK... wonder what's different?
FYI Amazon/netflix give a minimum of 25Mbps for a 4K stream and it seems to be recommended that you have at least 25% over that for a "good" experience. The streams are HDR as well as 4K which might explain why that's so high. If 8K gets established, we're likely talking about 100Mbps just for one stream.
That isn't a very compelling need case. I can obviously see why some would pay more for that. But my mom won't.
The average person doesn't spend much time waiting for large downloads to finish.
There are a lot of things we don't need, but which can change the way we use tech. My mother didn't need 20Mbit, but later when she had it anyway she discovered Netflix was quite good. Being able to get a game almost instantly rather than later changes your actions around that as well.
> I can obviously see why some would pay more for that.
Who wants to pay more? 900/900 is available for £25 per month in my street now. We should be demanding good service (i.e. overprovisioned for our needs) at a reasonable price.
They may have more dense populations but it does seem the US often gets left behind on these metrics, and usually some or other de-facto monopoly is behind the scenes being obstructive.
What we’re seeing however is companies who’d rather keep charging $50 and offer zero upgrades because there’s zero incentive to.
In Italy we went from an average of 2GB of mobile data to 50GB because a new player entered the market and existing companies had to adapt because they were obviously bleeding customers. I’m sure it cost them money, but it happened, and now people can use more internet for less money.
Now you can argue that my mom doesn’t use more than 2GB/month, but now she can, and so can I, without having to pay $100/month like you do in the US — I pay €8 for 50GB
Highly compressed 4k. With enough bandwidth we could actually stream Bluray quality without compromises. Sure, it's probably not the first item on the list priorities but it's a needless limitation entirely due to lacking network infrastructure.
thoroughly funny becase propagation of light in fibre is a tad slower than electricity in copper.
mostly irrelevant thou also because copper is usually only used in the last mile to the consumer and maybe in the datacenter.
totally agree on your point about latency.
Raising upload speeds would also give an incentive to cloud storage providers to take advantage of them and improve their ingestion speeds.
From a decent VPS I have easily hit 1 Gbps with google, Dropbox and OneDrive with rclone configured well.
1- Streaming 4K videos through Netflix, Youtube...
2- Downloading a video game and waiting 4 minutes instead of 4 hours.
3- Using a cloud backup service to sync 2/3 Terabytes of data.
4- Running a full bitcoin node, because why not.
2. Downloading a video game is usually capped by the server providing the download and not by your fiber connection speed.
3. Same for cloud backups, I never witnessed a case where my connection got saturated by this, usually server side won't handle that much throughput.
4. I wouldn't know, i don't think it's that typical though ?
Point is, all of this roughly fits in a stable 100Mbps connection actually providing it's announced bandwidth (and not the shitshow that usually is a 100Mbps ADSL connection). 200MBps would be plenty, 1 Gbps will be unused.
Steam and Microsoft are very obliging with that, games can come down very fast on a gigabit connection.
But if you have access to high speeds, behaviour changes. I can play that game pretty much now, rather than later or tomorrow, so maybe I will, rather than think about whether I want to later, maybe, or if I should just do something else.
For me though, installing a game is a rare event, and that's not just due to the inconvenience and delay. If 40Mbps is appreciably cheaper than 100, I'll take 40.
I think once you've gone past enough for the household's streaming needs - multiply each person by two 4K streams in case they have the tv on and a video on their phone, and a bit extra for music, always-on devices, browsing etc - you really are only looking at "burst" capacity, and whether it matters to you to get the big things fast.
OTOH it's becoming a bit of a moot point here - with 900/900 available for £25 (~$34) per month, why not?
Right on. I think for most people the 'ceiling' is probably something like 25Mbps. I suspect that few households ever try to run multiple 4K video streams.
When we discuss improving Internet infrastructure, the emphasis should be on ensuring everyone has access to at least 25Mbps, rather than on further improving Internet speeds in places where there's already an acceptable service.
That's one 4K stream and no slack. Fine for a single person, maybe. But even for just the two of us, if I'm watching a UHD stream on netflix/amazon and she's upstairs playing a game and watching twitch, that's not enough. A family with kids is going to struggle to enjoy modern services on that, and that's before we get into larger downloads.
That's really not enough for a household in 2021, and I see no virtue in trying to 'make do' here.
> the emphasis should be on ensuring everyone has access to at least 25Mbps
I would be surprised if (here in the UK) there were many places you couldn't already.
According to figures I can find from 2019, we were at 53% having access to 300Mbps+, 42% with access to 30-300, 4.5% with only 10-30 and 0.5% under that, which is pretty good going. That lowest 5% are clearly lagging and in need of modernising, but I don't think it's wrong to say we can improve it for the 42% as well, especially as the network we roll out now is the network that forms usage patterns over the next several years. It's not just about right now.
I wonder if 5G could help with the 'last mile' problem, regarding serving sparsely populated areas economically. It's fast enough to be used for home broadband.
It's no wonder, since bandwidth has ample room for easy improvement, while providing a good and stable ping is actually a bit difficult. But I still find it heavily biased, and a bit sad.
But 16MBps is 128mbps.
If this is the case the cap is way above 100Mbps. I regularly get 4-500Mbps downloading from Steam in EU.
How is it not enough? That's more than double what I get.
Here (in Silicon Valley) I get 23Mbps up / 1.5Mbps down. Seems plenty for nearly anything I can think of doing. With 13 months of stay at home and three concurrent zoom session running pretty much all day, it works just fine, never a hiccup.
The only use case where I wish for more upload bandwidth is for uploading backups to remote servers.
That’s barely enough to stream 4k on one screen. It’s common now to stream to several screens, one per person basically. Now everything is streamed, even gaming.
I imagine your ping isn’t great to go with that. Even with uses that don’t need a stream, large downloads and uploads must take forever.
Really I’m surprised that in SV you get such a bad connection, but in addition you can’t see the uses a better one would allow. That’s a bandwidth you get in rural houses around Europe, not acceptable for cities let alone a tech hub.
I would relent living in a place with less than 100/30 and 10ms ping nowadays. Luckily here you get 600 symmetrical with 3ms ping across the whole city by default, even on the cheapest plans.
Recently fibre providers have started to move in with a symmetrical service and I could now move to 900/900 for £25 per month. If I wasn't planning on moving home in a few months I'd switch in a heartbeat.
We're moving to Australia and it sounds like I might have some expectation-lowering to do :/
Who knows you might win the NBN lottery and get fibre at your house!
I did live there 10 years ago and had speeds around what you describe, maybe faster (having trouble recalling) via Bigpond cable at the time. It was the only decent option as ADSL was going to be 1Mbit due to distance from the exchange and the WiMax operator, Vivid, massively oversold and could often only provide 2/1.
Looks like things might not have moved on that much! I guess it just needs to be something else that goes on the list of stuff to check for before we buy a house a year or so down the line.
It’s been proven over and over that AT&T does not reinvest into their infrastructure.
Only certain areas with AT&T have modern gear. The rest is archaic garbage.
If there was a national effort to roll out fibre optic, I can easily imagine it costing fractions of a trillion in startup costs, but these would be recouped easily if everyone switches over from alternative services. Bell Canada rolled out fibre optic connections to many houses and buildings in big Canadian cities and easily started gaining customers for fibre, though still others stick with incumbent cable companies because they got a deal thanks to the competition (finally!).
Sadly, like in the US, the farther you travel from a big city, the harder it is to get any form of connectivity without manually arranging for your own fibre rollout at your own dime. But Bell Canada did say that regardless of how much it cost them to roll out fibre optic, they would make lots of money thanks to reduced maintenance costs and cheaper activation over the next 25 years+. Basically, telcos math tends to be "roll out fibre once, make money for the next 100+ years off the new cables just by replacing infrastructure at each end of the fibre line every X years..."
Found a quote from Glen LeBlanc, BCE’s Executive Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer:
> Now the benefits that we’re seeing 6 or 7 years down the road. Lower customer churn, higher ARPU per household, we’re seeing significant cost reductions in the network, lower truck rolls, lower calls to the contact centre. Ultimately, when you fast forward through the next decade, we’re going to end up with a very different cost structured telco in the future. There’s no electronics in the field. That’s one thing that I can’t overstate of how important that is. Whether that be a copper network that quite frankly over time in Canada does not age well in humidity and rain in Canadian weather. Or even fibre to the node or networks that have electronics in the field – DSLAMS or nodes. Those nodes ultimately lead to trouble, which leads to service troubles with customers and truck rolls and calls to the call centre.
> Fibre is all about elimination of all of that. It’s a glass strand from our office to your home. There are no active electronics in the field. It’s a passive network. The cost savings for that in the long term are very substantial. Payback is 7 to 10 years we would say on average.
> ... The numbers we’re seeing from Verizon are absolutely achievable [30% cost expenditure reduction once a city has fibre] and we’re seeing that. But I want to separate the cost savings you see today with the cost savings you ultimately see in the long run. The first cost savings I’ve already alluded to: that’s the lower truck rolls and better customer experience. The network performance savings, lower calls to the call centre. We’re absolutely enjoying that right out of the gate. We see about 40-50% lower truck rolls on a fibre network than our historic fibre to the node network. The great savings – the ultimate euphoria – is when you can shut down your copper network. That’s where I think you see the telco of tomorrow.
From https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/06/ignorescaretacticsbell/
Hmm. Let's think about that. Let's say a "fraction" of a trillion is $240 Billion. There are ~100 million households who are potential broadband customers. If they pay $100/month, that's an income stream of $10 Billion/month or $120 billion per year. So you'd be repaid in 2 years! Well, unfortunately that's not all profit, so let's say 10 years. Still decent.
But wait! There are already 100 million (actually 114 million) households with broadband in the U.S., and their average broadband speed is 124 Mbs. Yes, that's behind the world-leading Singapore at 200 Mbs (I wonder why that is..) but better than Sweden and about the same as France -- two other nations with population density closer to the US than to Singapore. So pretty much everyone who wants broadband has broadband with the exception of a small number of households in rural areas - you are talking about say, 20 million households. But there it's really expensive to lay fiber. Now those rural households will pay their $100 but that's an income stream of 24 Billion/month which will not justify spending fractions of a trillion. And for the other 120 million households, you are going to have a hard time getting them to pay more for faster broadband, as there are rapidly diminishing returns. Not many would be willing to pay $30/month more to go from 120 Mbs (US) to 200 Mbs (singapore).
That convexity (diminishing returns) means when you begin your rollout, the incumbents can reduce their price by $20/month and you have to massively increase speeds to compete. Then they reduce their price by $10/month and you have to massively increase speeds even more. So you are really screwed now, with a trillion in debt, and at the complete mercy of competition that can steal your customers by spending a lot less money, in terms of reduced fees, than you have to spend in terms of increased infrastructure costs. That is why beyond a certain point, it doesn't make sense to compete on faster broadband.
So I think the mistake you are making is thinking in terms of average revenue and average costs. But actually you need to think in marginal terms. Say it costs an extra $X to deliver a network that is 1 MB faster than the current network. But customers would be willing to pay $Y more for 1 MB of speed, or equivalently, would give up 1 MB in speed for savings of $Y. If X < Y, you have a winning proposition, but if X > Y, you have a losing proposition, and this is true regardless of whether the average costs and average revenue work out in your favor. And the problem is that Y is kinda small in a market that is close to broadband saturation, even if everyone always wants more speed and even if there are rural households that are left out.
The point then is that regardless of timeline, rolling out fibre optic is more profitable than not doing so, on a long-term basis.
Also, prices did not stay at $100, they actually jumped to well over $200 when you consider both the highest speed tiers and the sales of expanded television plans and digital services. It’s not impossible but it’s really, really hard to sell people premium 4K subscriptions to Netflix and other add-ons when you only offer 15/1 ADSL or have to start paying for two circuits to get VDSL, and that still neglects the very expensive infrastructure upkeep for copper-based networks, the variety of DSL modems in use, and other connectivity challenges posed by distance-to-CO problems.
Ultimately, fibre keeps customers happy and happier customers spend more. That’s the logic these companies should be using…
As far as no ethernet, if it were me I'd find a way. A lot of sins can be forgiven or forgotten with a little drywall mud when your lease is up. And full duplex wired speeds are worth sinning for (IMO). :D
That depends on quite a lot. The quite popular Ubiquiti AC-LITE access point which I use has a max bandwidth of 866.7 Mbps. At 2.4 GHz I can do only about 100 Mbps (there's a lot of traffic), and real-world bandwidth at 5 GHz tops out around 320 Mbps for me (tested with iperf). And the latter only became possible when I enabled 80 MHz channel width, which was somehow disabled on the Unifi firmware.
And that's before you get to the issue of what your devices are capable of, especially if they're older. My understanding is that unless you're on WiFi 6, you're limited below 1 Gbps for link speed unless you've got 3 antennas or an extension that can operate with 160 MHz channel width. The first phones that support WiFi 6 are barely two years old. Ubiquiti's first WiFi 6 router still only does 1.5 Gbps, so it's questionable what you'll get in a real world scenario, and the 4x4 MIMO version is still only taking pre-orders.
I have a lot of WiFi devices, but this is a single family residence.
In my leased flat I ran a 10m cable through a brick wall and across a room, fully hidden behind the baseboards. Totally worth it.
I'm plugged into a Google WiFi mesh AP via an 8 port GbE switch on my desktop, and only getting 106 Mbps down / 123 up. I tried plugging-in directly, and it's the same difference.
229 Mbps down / 243 up on an iPad Pro 10.5 from the couch, 268 / 356 near the wall where the main base AP is at, and 335 / 355 right next to the base AP. On the mesh AP, I'm getting 63 / 71.
I think it's the physics limitations of 5.8 GHz because base-to-mesh is going 12 m / 40 ft through 2 walls.
For example in Lithuania I have 1gbps with no limits for 20€.
IMO data caps should be there, since if they are not there you can assume they exist but are hidden. Because per GB cost is low for ISPs, but not zero. I feel it is better that limit is made explicit and visible.
After careful diagnosis (as much as you can, of such things) and checking off everything else, I inferred that the local ISP’s peering arrangements were terrible.
I was regularly uploading to YouTube while there: early on I would normally get 30–40Mbps, but at some point (maybe around September?) it dropped to ~1.4Mbps, only going up to 10 or 20 once every couple of months (and even that commonly only for ten or fifteen minutes). In February and early March it started improving again more often, but still not consistently.
(The ISP also NATted who knows how many customers across what looked to be a /24 or /25, done in such a way that I would not have a single public IP address—if I asked canhasip.com, canhazip.com, whatismyipaddress.com and a few others, they’d probably all give me different answers. And if I looked at BitTorrent downloads from the addresses, multiple full movies and such were being downloaded daily, traffic which definitely wasn’t coming from the household I was at.)
Here is the global index: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index The US is definitively ahead of India in Fixed Broadband (180mbps vs 55mbps); though for a populous and developing country, India is certainly doing quite well.
You'd think we would be leading the world in broadband speeds, right? In reality as long as broadband providers aren't forced to upgrade by either legislation or competition there's no reason to spend money on upgrades for an already captive customer base.
But there's always the fear they will keep charging you rent anyways, and/or charge you for not returning "their" unit when you close your account.
Retail service providers sell plans to consumers, an in turn buy access from wholesalers.
To this argument in particular: the whole idea of providing access to everyone is to level the playing field and create opportunities. It’s the promise of connectivity spurring innovation, changing the landscape, etc.
Your point is valid, but 5/10Mbps up/down is the best I can get in San Francisco.
Definitely not a rural only problem. It’s a US problem.
I expected you lot would be able to get cheap 100/100 as a minimum in cities like San Fransisco.
Edit: grammar
In last 10 years, I've lived in 3 different apartments within 4 km radius from the Helsinki Railway Station. The latest one is the first where a 1000/100 Mbit cable is available, the two others were 24/(0.8-2.4) Mbit ADSL, or mobile that slows to a crawl so that Netflix / Youtube become unwatchable at times you'd be home watching them.
Meanwhile, random acquaintances from the deepest Savo report that fiber just dropping to their front porch around 10 years ago.
I can imagine 4G congestion being a problem in Helsinki, though it's more of a population density issue. 5G should fix that once it's more widespread.
Broadband is a joke absolutely everywhere in this country, not just rural.
I guess AT&T doesn't even service its own world headquarters?
There are places in kansas city where you can get gigabit fiber from three different companies.
It is only with competition that prices come down and speeds go up. It isn't really that hard in a physical sense to spool out coax in a neighborhood and from a technical standpoint that can deliver a lot of bandwidth.
Also copper tends to be quite pricey. If you open the ground, you might just as well lay fibre. It would be ideal to have a pair at each home for redundancy and potential business full duplex 10 Gbps connection or two independent providers each on a different fibre. The extra fibre that you have "just in case" doesn't cost much at all as you just lay it to the nearest node and not further passive MUX/ CWDM/ DWDM or bandwidth sharing can be used from there depending if you want to have active components there.
The best way to ensure proper cabling in the last mile would be to have pipes for cables straight into each home. That way, you could change most data-carrying cables without digging or without digging much. This seems to be the approach with fibre in some countries.
I’m tempted to still say no even if they offer the service at half price. All these years of shafting.
Investing in anything below gigabit for new cables to households which didn't have any seems an obvious waste though. I would even make sure the cables are capable of conducting 10 or more gigabits per second to make the investment future-proof.
By the way, perhaps it's time to stop calling 100 Mbps and slower connection "broadband".
Used to be fairly bad "up to" 3mbit wifi wireless, then 70mbit "4g" wireless, with serious contention in evenings and issues everytime wind or rain occurred (which is every day in west of ireland!)
The government has a plan to connecting everyone to fiber, this forced the local at&t like company (eir/eircon) to try connect as many people as they could, which they done with surprising speed
No fiber available.
It's embarrassing that I live in San Francisco of all places and this is the best I can do. Google/WebPass, AT&T fiber, and Sonic all aren't available at my address (a 10-year-old small condo building). Monkeybrains is an option, but they only guarantee 25Mbps, and you only find out if you get something better (but they seem to max out at 80Mbps or so) after they install the antenna on your roof.
Daintree in FNQ for example, quite a lot of inner australia. Don't get me wrong... I do understand the complexities of delivery, but it isn't perfect either.
My interpretation of the various data points was that it likely did result is a faster roll-out, at pretty much similar costs as FTTP w/ higher maintenance and sooner need to replace.
In other words it did what governments have become expert at, mortgaging the future for the present.
To be clear - they were still _available_, and in many cases, your only option, but they were an anchor pulling down the average, so AT&T "just didn't want them to count".
Famous last words, but symmetric gig up and down should be enough for anyone for a long time, and there will likely be ways of increasing the bandwidth through the same pipes beyond that as technology improves.
Maybe this time they'll mandate competition since it's clear the last two decades haven't had it.
Imagine being able to serve 10000 streaming customers from your home, free of the restrictions of youtube.
Well light only travels at 2/3 of its speed inside current fiber. I keep wondering when we could have cables coming close to "c" at a affordable price.
I know this may sound strange, the faster we move to 5G, the more that is being pushed from Spec to Modem, ( I know HN hate Qualcomm, but they are ready to ship X60 / 3GPP Release 16 Modem this year.) and the more they are forced to upgrade their Network. Someday 5G MNO will start competing with ISP. Which I think is already happening with T-Mobile in US and many other European countries .
At the rate things are going, US may end up not having nationwide high speed wired internet for most home at all.
Ever since I have avoided ATT and they are still far more into billing than provisioning (my neighbors) who have max 75 mb down when I am getting 200/15 from a competitor. ATT is a useless dinosaur and should do the honorable thing: but they haven't ever acted anything but self-serving.
You would think that AT&T would like to be competitive in the future. Really strange.
It is honestly crazy. Not surprising they are trying to further limit bandwidth.
this was THE hot battle of the early aughts. the fight for the fiber. Local-loop unbundling[2] was working, there were competitive ISPs in most markets. infrastructure costs were shared, there were reasonable whole-sale rates one could pay to start an local ISP. it was a competitive interesting market.
that all came crashing down. fiber did get rolled out, some, but it seems like the telecomm infrastructure in general is ill maintained, not expanding, and is uncompetitive in more places than not now. customers have gotten bounced between different local owners of whatever the likely-decaying local telecomm is, companies giving up not-very-profitable local monopoloies to more ruthless cost-cutting new owners, who will face no competition.
stories like this seem so so so far downstream to me. "local heroine junkie having soreness in arm." oh really, you don't say? the competitive spirit in which the internet & ISPs emerged was crushed, ground to bits by a court that opted to side with industry to effectively overturn congressional law. where-as previously a company might invest in infrastructure & build out, & become the local Incumbent Carrier, the whole system of leasing (at wholesale rates) pieces of each other's infrastructure collapsed in the wake of the Supreme Court's dismantling & overriding of the Telecommunications Act. even if a Incumbent Carrier company does offer to lease their infrastucture to a Competitive Carrier, how is the Competitive Carrier ever going to trust that the Incumbent Carrier wont jack up the price? the whole system of fair, reasonable, non-discirminatory ability to serve in this utility market was ruined by the Supreme Court listening to AT&T, listening to Verizon, listening to big carriers, who lied, who all the actual experts decried, but the Courts gave business what they wanted: overturning the Telecommunications Act, overturning Competitive Local Exchange Carriers, ending Local-Loop Unbundling.
2004 was a shit year for internet access, a change into such a worse less-competitive less-investable mode. What we continue to see is a direct, downstream result of that decision.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_car...