The future is in symmetrical, high-speed internet speeds
eff.org
eff.org
I will start with mine, Spain. Here, every ISP offers symmetrical speeds since they became a selling point some years ago. It seems like the minimum speed nowadays is 100Mbps with 600Mbps as the average and 1Gbps in the most expensive packages.
Right now I am living in a little village in a very rural area where a local company offers 300Mbps (symmetrical, of course).
The exception is fiber, where all connections are symmetrical, which has become a selling point.
Speeds go up to 1000/100 on cable and 1000/1000 on fiber. I've got 100/100 on fiber, which is plenty fast for two people with our current usage.
One way to get better upload speed is corporate contracts, but they are expensive, hard to setup and availability is limited.
Fortunately, the new wireless stuff is symmetrical. I’ve tried one of them for a few months as an experiment, measured 40 mbit/sec both upload and download, the tech is LTE.
Are you inner city or right next to a node, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m in a ‘regional centre’ and while ISPs are happy to charge us for 50/20 or 100/20 plans, we just can’t/won’t get those speeds here (even before the pandemic and the work from home shift).
It’s so frustrating trying to help out less tech savvy family and explaining that they’re basically getting the broadband speeds they had before and that’s all they’ll get on this NBN (if they’re lucky), and that paying more than the minimum $70/month for higher speeds is throwing money away.
I'm with Aussie Broadband, who are more expensive than most.
It’s HFC by iiNet not NBN, and it’s so much better. We had NBN for years and had endless issues, this has been utterly flawless without a single dropout in over a year now, and if anything we usually get well over advertised speeds.
Residential broadband excluding Athens is mostly down to 50/5mbps and in many suburbs in cities (e.g. Khania, Crete) don't even get more than 1mbps upload.
Yet we have politicians and commercials all day showing how '5G' will change our lives. It's a joke.
As someone else mentioned there are some smaller players who give kind of symmetrical but their coverage is way too small, like 10% of major metropolitan areas and nowhere else.
Before that I had 120/20 with a company called Fizz and paid about 60$.
At least over here everything is asymmetrical and has been for as far as I can remember.
The counterarguments you typically hear about it being hard/expensive to provide such services in the US due to geography and population distribution are, in my strong opinion, nothing more than industry propaganda and a poor excuse.
It’s also worth noting that, while cable has various limitations, it was an earlier-deployed technology. So while Spain has closed the gap recently, the US enjoyed a healthy lead over the last decade. (For example in Akamai’s 2015 study, Spain was #30 and the US was #20.)
As to the difficulty and expense of serving the US—what’s your opinion based on? It’s easy to blame the “industry.” But it’s not like the US public sector is great at building infrastructure. Here in Maryland we are building 16 miles of light rail in the middle of existing suburban streets for the same price as Copenhagen spent to build 16 miles of fully automated subway. Building any kind of infrastructure in the US is very difficult and expensive for various legal reasons.
Also, 1Gbps+ symmetric fiber connections can allow for lots of things, like hosting videos yourself, or running your own backup service for your devices. A family of four can easily use it by streaming high definition media and data up and down.
It opens the door to not having to rely on FAANG to host and serve personal content, maybe even allowing for federated services again.
The majority of Internet traffic today is video, where there's no real reason for bandwidth usage to be asymmetric. You might be streaming webcam video up to a Zoom call or streaming a movie down from Netflix. Today, the former has far lower video quality than the latter. But why should it? Why can't we stream equally high-quality 4K (and better) video in both directions?
…Well, bandwidth is only one reason, with other reasons including the low quality of most webcams and processing power limitations. And video doesn't require that much bandwidth. The 20Mbit the EFF is complaining about is already good enough for one 4K video stream. Still, only one, and only if that 20Mbit is an actually achievable transfer rate rather than a theoretical cap. 100Mbit would be much more comfortable, especially for multi-user households.
On the other hand, 2Gbps is beyond what video streaming will have any use for in the foreseeable future. But I'd argue most people have no need for 2Gbps down either, with some exceptions.
Focusing explicitly on "20Mbit ... is already good enough for oen 4K video stream", this is only true if the peak rate is 20Mbit, or if it's not a real time application, where buffering can be applied to smooth out that stream.
Try streaming a 4K RDP session on 20Mbit, and watch that experience degrade rapidly during any periods of high motion on the remote machine.
Averages only work for workloads that can be smoothed. For any real time applications, what matters most is the peak rate. For example, a single 4K RDP session can peak at over 80Mbit. Even at 50Mbit, the session will become unusable during peak motion periods, in the worst possible way: you lose the content, and there's a delay before you're able to interact with the session in real time again.
So yes, 20Mbit is good enough for lowest common denominator stuff, but there's a lot of value being ignored outside of watching TV.
Spain deployed ADSL back in the late 90s, and had it available in relatively rural areas before major cities (e.g. London) had availability.
Spain started deploying FTTP a few years ago, everywhere, to replace the ageing copper infrastructure.
Spain never really had a large scale cable rollout outside of fortunate areas of a few major cities. For the vast majority, it was copper line services only.
Now ~everyone can get FTTP, and anyone who has that has symmetric services.
There aren't many major applications that benefit from symmetric connectivity as a rule, because the vast majority of the world (including those in Silicon Valley) dont have that capability. The userbase for such applications is relatively tiny.
This is part of why we depend on 'the cloud'. The idea that anyone can host anything depends on decent upload rates. Why couldn't an on-prem equivalent of Dropbox be mainstream if everyone had symmetric connectivity 20 years ago already?
As for where I got my opinion that the "they're doing the best they can, it's expensive to do in the US" line is a poor excuse for the high prices and poor quality of services... I have some personal experience in dealing with their business side, which shows none of the qualities of a business working hard to compete. That shouldn't convince anyone else, but the obvious anti-consumer behaviors like forcing bundles on people, absurdly low upload speeds (far under what docsis will allow for on well laid out networks), arbitrary data caps, and so on shouldn't give the impression they're working hard to support US technical innovation. There are massive price drops in the rare competitive area (clearly they're working with a lot of margin), and comcast (e.g.) makes $40B yearly profit while failing at basic customer service. Last, are the success stories of municipal ISPs and foreign ISPs, which, despite the objections, often are very comparable expense-wise and still make the US ISPs look as awful as they are.
Specifically, they are targeting an old CATV technology which is delivering the last mile service by coaxial cable (typically alredy existing) and asymmetrical by both design and low layer implementation. Still very popular in the US due the population density.
I have 10/1 Mbit free of charge at home, the operator event sent me a modem free of charge. This might be a deal the housing cooperative (equivalent) has with the operator though, I'm only renting.
In my experience connections are mostly asymmetrical, in the 10-100 Mbit range down and a tenth of it up. Costs are very low compared to the world, $5-20/mo or so. Usually ADSL, sometimes cable.
Downtown in a bigger city I once got lucky and had like 1 Gbit symmetrical for $12/mo. It was kinda crazy, anything you could think of downloaded in less than a minute. It was faster to download from the Internet than to transfer files over USB.
Yes it is. I imagine most of the people upgrade the base speed amyway and you can get it pretty cheap e.g. 100/100 for 10 €/month which IMHO is very reasonable. I wish other countries like Spain would follow this model because it’s very affordable for everyone.
Speedtest shows avg 350 Mbps up & down (wifi limited), plenty of headroom if I needed wired. Blows the water out of anything I used to get in Seattle (read this comcast!!).
FTTH is quickly taking over with over 70% coverage in homes passed. Pretty sure I saw less dense areas (rural?) had hit 60% last year according to some goverment report.
DSL is practically dead and "Fiber to the Cabinet" never really happened here. Coax is shrinking. Those still using these technologies are of course getting asymmetrical down/up. Some "Fiber to the Building" exists but mostly with copper ethernet to the housing unit, so its practically full FTTH.
Things that could be better is: - pricing, it's not exactly great most places, although smart HoAs can usually get decent pricing if they actually try. - the networks are very rarely open access, local monopolies are rife.
I've been on 1Gbps/1Gbps open access FTTH since ~2014, coming from 300/20 cable.
They don't guarantee that bandwidth though. But you can reach it sometimes.
The ISP provides the router but there is e.g. this one now that seems good: https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/wifi-router/arche...
Also for Germany, I still think you're really lucky if you get fiber at all. Sometimes small villages get it and in big cities only in certain neighborhoods.
Infrastructure is being migrated to FTTx. Which means you can have xDSL or direct fiber to endpoint. In case of xDSL, DSLAMs are distributed to the FTTx boxes, hence no more "distance to post office" woes.
Speeds are asymmetrical. ADSL's upload is a joke (50KB/sec in reality), but VDSL2 provides really good Download/4 upload speeds (this is the nature of the VDSL2). My home connection is 24/6Mbps, with true to promises speeds 7/24.
Fiber is available up to 10Gbps, but they're not cheap, and not available everywhere. Speeds are again asymmetrical.
I think asymmetrical speeds are not big limiters after a certain point, but a symmetrical line always would be better. My home is wired for xDSL, so no ethernet conduits or fiber termination anywhere, and I'm happy with my speeds (for now). However, having a symmetrical network connection at office which is limited by interface limits is a big factor in this happiness.
Looks like 1gbps is ₺875/mo on average (first three months is cheaper, remaining nine is more expensive) if you promise to use it for 12 months. Has 20mbps upload.
10gpbs is ₺8000/mo, but you have to sign a 24 month contract for it. Has 50mbps upload.
They're extremely asymmetrical, needlessly expensive. It's like a data hoarder's dream, but I don't know what will they do if you manage to saturate the bandwidth for a considerable amount of time.
If you live in a detached house though, your only option is usually xDSL where you're lucky to get 15/1Mbit for ~20€ if you live "further from the post office".
Fixed wireless (LTE) usually offers better speeds if it's not oversubscribed in your area (40/40Mbit) but is not available everywhere, is more expensive and includes data caps.
Fiber to individual houses is mostly possible only in new developments, as you can't run new wiring on poles in Slovakia, only in the ground, so no ISP bothers to upgrade older houses.
Right now I only have 4G, and given that I don't have many neighbors but a antenna nearby it works great too
Take current 100/20 Mbps speeds. An average Zoom call uses 0.6 Mbps upstream, while a super-HD 1080p one uses 3.8 Mbps up. (And virtually nobody videoconferences from home in 1080p anyways, who wants coworkers to see your skin blemishes in maximum detail?!)
So a connection or 20 Mbps upload supports 33 users in theory, or 5 at super-HD. Even allowing half that in practice... seems fine to me.
The 100 Mbps download is necessary when you've got someone watching an 8K VR video on their headset, and a few 1080p movie streams going as well, which is more reasonable in a family setting.
But most people just don't have any use for upload speeds anywhere near as fast as download. Or at least certainly not until we start doing 8K 3D video calls in front of massive 3D displays, which isn't anytime soon...
[1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-r...
I mean, it depends what you mean by ‘soon’. Infra subsidised today will largely still be there in 20 years.
To be honest, I’m shocked that they’re considering subsidising anything other than fibre at this point.
Ideally in the future you would A) be broadcasting directly to other participants, not going through zoom’s servers, which might multiply upload bandwidth needs B) be broadcasting at several 10s of Mbps per stream.
I definitely prefer higher bandwidth vconf. I’m not worried about blemishes, but I want to see people’s minute facial expressions better.
What? No. 10 Mbps is already plenty for high quality 1080p with the latest codecs. Even 1080p Blurays only run 20-40 Mbps and they're typically very conservatively compressed.
Using your numbers — and we’ll pretend we haven’t already sailed past 1080p as a standard — if we expect better than garbage zoom tier quality, at 20-40 for one stream, most of our isp connections are currently woefully slow for uploads.
Many many many people have others who live in their households, whether they’re roommates, partners, or kids. So if you have 3 people on video chat, suddenly if we want high quality streams, that need goes from 20 and shoots up to 60+. If you have 3 kids on a video chat or streaming for school or play and a parent or two working from home, suddenly you’re up to 100+ upload.
And that’s ignoring that 1080p is becoming old world. I haven’t looked recently, but when buying my last monitor set a year ago, 4k seemed to be by far the most commonly available.
this whole x amount of bandwidth “is plenty” almost always seems to ignore a) real life situations of most families/roommates and b) forward moving technologies.
That's insane. Like I mentioned in another comment, high-quality rips of 1080p movies tend to be 5 Mbps, and that's generally with a lot more detail and motion than what your camera is filming at home.
There's really no point in 1080p streaming video above Zoom's 3.8 Mbps. Even that's already overkill which is why almost nobody uses it. While the "20 mbps" you're talking about is beyond the threshold of lossless for human perception, and 40 is beyond that.
And beyond it? There's virtually no use for 4K video in personal communications, nobody wants to see the pores in your nose. It's not about technological limitation, it's about use cases. And a 20 mbps uplink handles the real life situations of most families and roommates just fine, when you use actual real numbers and not the ones you're just making up.
> high-quality rips of 1080p movies tend to be 5 Mbps
This is nonsense. A decent 20-30GB BRRip will be at least 25-30Mbps. Also, it’s not a fair comparison because it’s not real time encoding. If you can afford to encode in 5% real-time speed you can get much better compression ratios.
I think you're the one imagining things here.
Like I said in an earlier comment, I record h.264 in "ultrafast" CRF 14. Every guide that exists says this is below the threshold for indistiguishable from raw footage, and my own eyes agree after extensive side-by-side comparisons. I go as low as 14 because it's overkill. But there's simply no visible difference. And it's an average of 34 Mbps for the kind of stuff I shoot, which as I said is overkill already.
200 Mbps is insanely unnecessarily high, even for real-time encoding on a crappy CPU.
What are you filming? It sounds like you’re streaming a video of your face; how are you capturing it? If your video is blasted with shot noise from a 10mm^2 sensor through an 4mm wide lens, where “1080p” is more of a recording convention than a faithful description of the resolving power of the system, I can see how 34Mbps might look as good as whatever you see uncompressed.
Can you provide examples?
https://www.screenshotcomparison.com is suited for this especially.
Unfortunately my job is pretty boring. Most of my video chats are low entropy.
I would double that, for at least movies. Not sure if you are going to see an increase in quality in smartphone style cameras.
4k UHD Netflix stream is ~20Mbps. 1080p is usually about 5-6Mbps, and 99% of people say that it looks great and is all they want.
4k UHD is not needed for effective video chats for most business and personal use. And they wouldn't even need the same as a stream as it's a relatively static image and thus easy to compress.
Your image is typically a little square on the screen too (not the full display size). It is highly unlikely consumers will ever shell out for the camera equipment to create high quality images that need such bandwidth, even if such bandwidth becomes common.
Moore's law will maybe push this all forward in time, but what you describe is a total exaggeration of the current situation.
Obviously a 100/10 or 25/5 connection isn't going to cut it. I think really the gist of the article is "You need enough bandwidth in both directions". That's it. If you have a 100mbit, 200mbit or 500mbit or 1000mbit down with a 100+ mbit up, that's less important. "Symmetry" doesn't matter, it's enough bandwidth in both directions that matters.
The fact that "enough in both directions" and "symmetric" have been conflated is that because for a part of history, only symmetric connections did have enough upload bandwidth. With the gigabit and multi-gigabit down bandwidths, there is less need for symmetry so long as you have a fast upload.
I fully agree with the EFF that you need a decent upload, to support the applications of today and next few years. But to go fully symmetric actually means to lower the download in favour of upload, allocating exactly half of the spectrum to each.
So absolutely, once you reach a certain threshold I think most users are going to opt to carve up the spectrum in a way that favours download, just based on typical needs.
That's so incorrect I don't even know where to begin.
I regularly record my own "talking head" in 1080p from OBS in h.264 at CRF 14 in "ultrafast", which is extreme crazy quality/space overkill (literally indistinguishable image from original, extremely low CPU usage), and that's an average of 34 Mbps.
I then immediately recompress the resulting enormous file to a still extremely high-quality CRF 21 in "veryslow" to be suitable for editing and subsequent recompression later, and that results in an average of 2.4 Mbps.
For comparison, high-quality 1080p h.264 movie and television releases on torrent sites are usually around 5 Mbps. The difference is that half my frame is a plain/stationary background while movies and TV have complex backgrounds, hence double the bitrate.
I have to ask -- where did you get the idea that "high quality 1080p is in the 200-400Mbps range"? That's off by two entire orders of magnitude. It's almost all the way to raw uncompressed 1080p, which is 1,500 Mbps.
BRRips are frequently 30+GB for a 1-2 hour movie. Do the math. You’re off by like 5-8x.
> I have to ask -- where did you get the idea that "high quality 1080p is in the 200-400Mbps range"?
From actually filming and editing video.
Keep in mind that real-time encoders (such as the one in a video recorder or that zoom has to use for reasonable latency) are pretty constrained and will generally achieve worse ratios. If you need to get 3Mbps in real-time on a laptop your only option is basically to quantize the shit out of the video. Releases that can encode slower-than-real-time can use longer GOP, B-frames, etc.
> It's almost all the way to raw uncompressed 1080p, which is 1,500 Mbps.
10bit 444 1080p60 is 3.7Gbps.
That's something entirely different, not what I was talking about. Also, if a Blu-Ray gives you the space, there's no reason not to use it. That doesn't mean you need it. Which is precisely why the rips that people commonly share don't.
> From actually filming and editing video.
That's for recording frames independently for editing on a professional camera. Not for anything you'd ever transmit live to a consumer in a million years.
> will generally achieve worse ratios
Worse than 200-400Mbps? What are you even talking about? Even an iPhone encodes to just 16 Mbps. Which is definitely not greater than 400.
> basically to quantize the shit out of the video.
Looks fine to me. It doesn't need to be lossless. It just needs to be good. I've never heard anyone complain about an iPhone "quantizing the shit" out of their video. To the contrary, people love iPhone-quality video.
> 10bit 444 1080p60 is 3.7Gbps.
Obviously I'm talking about 8-bit 30fps (444).
No. First, 1-2 hour is a 100% increase. 15GB for a 2hour movie is realistic, with a very high quality (CRF 18 or 19). Which would then be ~15Mbps, considering that there is also audio. Going further does not increase quality, but does increase file size.
It seems to me that you want to transfer an intermediate-codec (or even raw) via the Internet.
Sure it can't be as optimal as a non real-time compressor can, and should therefore need more bandwidth, but high compression ratios on such an image aren't difficult. It's not valid to compare professional film work or even output BluRay encodes to what's required for your typical home video call.
For example here https://www.red.com/recording-time if I put in 8K, 60fps and choose the lowest compression ratio, it's still saying it will only use 270Mbps. At 2K the highest bitrate seems to be 41Mbps.
I posit the real reason is because no-one makes a decent webcam for desktops and laptops, not even Apple.
Apple uses a lower-quality webcam in laptops because of the thinness of the lid.
Logitech needs to stop using cheap plastic lenses and excessively compressing video. USB3 has sufficient bandwidth.
Also it's just compressing to MJPEG, which is far higher quality than any subsequent h.264 compression your CPU would ever do. The Logitech Brio transmits raw data over USB3 like you're asking, but the resulting image quality is identical -- I've tested them side-by-side.
(Ancient 920's performed on-camera h.264 compression which was later removed -- if you have one of those, be sure to select the MJPEG stream instead.)
(HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869460.)
You absolutely do need to manually set and lock exposure, focus, white balance, and ensure you have proper lighting. Once you do that, it works like a charm. And this advice is what pretty much every streaming tutorial on YouTube advises.
The softness issue is particular to the Logitech Brio, which he notes, and which matches my own testing. The C920 doesn't suffer from that.
Yes I wish the software for the camera settings was more intelligent. But ultimately that's a software issue that's fixable with manual settings. The hardware is solid, provided normal lighting conditions.
The bandwidth needed for a high quality 1080p stream isn’t gonna be much more than one from a shitty 1080p camera. The better image would benefit from less compression / more bits, but it’s not an orders of magnitude difference.
Most people don't have any use for upload speeds because very few have upload speeds that can be used in an interesting way.
If lots of people had lots of upload, you might start to see widespread commercial products for home-hosting what currently goes in cloud providers and social media sites.
A week ago I downloaded a 4.5 gigabyte photo from the ESA to print and put on my wall, yes all of those pixels mattered. It took closer to 30 seconds than the ten minutes it would have otherwise on a more reasonable “fast” home internet connection. So there’s several minutes of my life I probably would have just sat around waiting for otherwise.
It’s not about big constant needs but making the delay shorter on many smaller things. (i.e. latency over throughput, but latency not in ms for computer networking but seconds and minutes for tasks on a human level)
I remember when a decade ago I occasionally needed to share large VM images with a customer. I'd set up my notebook to upload it over the weekend and hope the upload wouldn't abort. Occasionally remoting in from home to check it was still uploading.
Now a 50Gb VM image is absolutely nothing to me. I can let people pull that from me during a coffee break, instead of scheduling it around a weekend.
It's not that sharing a 50Gb image was impossible before. It's that I can do it so quickly now, that I can do things like these much more liberally and don't have to plan around them as much.
It’s unrealistic to expect mass-market household products to be engineered to support a small number of users with bespoke requirements.
All households benefit if you think about video uploads, backups, etc
It also means I can keep a ubuntu mirror, private docker repo, possibly IPFS node in the future, backup server, all at home.
I also never have to worry about my work/uploads saturating connection and interfering with wife/kids connections.
Growing up with 20KB/s I'd take the fastest connection I can, if I could update to 10Gb/s and more I would :)
Not every worker in the world goes to work in a shared office space with enterprise class Comcast or fiber accounts. Modern businesses of many types can benefit or even must have fast uploads.
I always mentally equate low upload limits with "the ISP wants to make sure you don't run a server". Or "this internet connection is just a way to watch TV". Which I find very sad. You can do a lot more than just consume other people's creative work on the internet. Some creative things don't need much upstream bandwidth (cough cough github) but there are also a lot of things (e.g. sharing videos of your craft projects) that are much more pleasant with more upload speed.
In my experience, the #1 issue is poor WiFi deployment. Then, users of cable broadband use Ookla for speed tests instead of Fast - Ookla is scammed by Comcast and Frontier.
What if you want fiber on your block? In California, Comcast and AT&T will not touch the poles to protect their incumbency, and PG&E who owns the poles lies and says it’s the ISP’s problem that the poles aren’t ready for fiber. Based on my canvassing of fiber users in the Bay Area, pole improvements came from the cities’ commissions forcing PG&E to do the maintenance work, because it is supposed to anyway.
The EFF does not identify the real antagonist here: public utility companies.
Also more than one person lives at a household typically. Imagine 3 or 5 zoom calls going at 4mbps simultaneously. That's 20mbps right off the bat, which over saturates most people's upload, so zoom goes conservative by default.
Or imagine in a remote learning, you could see the pupils laptop screen , their desk and their face simultaneously so you can help them with their issue quickly, in 60-30fps HD+ per stream. And then do that for 3 kids + 2 adults and now you have 60mbps. For the adults, simultaneous face, desk & slides would be a form of seamless white boarding at a presentation.
Many applications are limited by shitty internet.
The infrastructure must be present for the culture (or, optimistically, the Culture) to grow.
About 5-10 years too late.
Sure you can work around it with dynamic DNS but that's a hassle and hassles like that are what make it infeasible.
Self-hosting is, unfortunately, not viable any longer. Even for mid-sized hosting providers.
Can starlink support synchronous up/down? I doubt it. The satellite swarm companies are going to bring the internet to rural/third world/oceania/etc in a way that hasn't been possible before.
Even cellular won't solve deserts, ocean, tundra, and IIRC the tower density to support decent 4G/5G for true broadband just isn't economically feasible outside of suburbs, towns, highways, etc.
But I'm shocked at the support range of LTE in wisconsin and upper peninsula michigan, although the bandwidth is pretty average, so what do I know.
I don’t think wireless is the future due to limited spectrum and high latency. The future is still wired, it’s just that private companies can’t be the entities trusted to do the build-out — it has to be a public utilities project.
Not too long ago 10 mbits was ‘broadband’, so, maybe various forms of wireless will be just fine. Certainly more flexible in terms of long term options
China did a great job at building out a fiber network. Unfortunately it's compromised by the GFW and other issues. Australia recently attempted to fund a national plan for fiber deployment, but managed to privatise the implementation to the point where it was never delivered and has become a joke. A couple of years ago, you still literally couldn't get a connection right in the middle of Sydney. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network
Their take: There is no significant demand for wired connections above 25 Mbit/s and consideration of upgrading the network will not be undertaken until demand for high-bandwidth services is proven.
How would terrestrial fiber work in rural america, far north alaska and canada, the sahara, antarctica, siberia, etc?
Once the satellites are aloft, and the customer base established, assuming they get special SpaceX launch rates, what makes the upkeep expensive that would require subsidy?
Especially if it comes with widescale IPV6 rollouts which will mean no more NAT traversal.
The worst, not counting dial-up, was my ADSL service in Oakland. They said the wires were never upgraded. I finally switched to Comcast.
Start with your requirements and then pontificate, eg "I want this":
* Nominal download speed with no latency guarantees at up to 100Mbs-1
* Sustainable throughput for three concurrent 4HD streams
* Latency suitable for speech without lag
* 1500 byte frame transfer without me having to worry about MTU issues
The third requirement is a bit tricky but generally doable. If you do VoIP then >30ms latency is the start of the point where people need to manage their comms. Humans are actually really good at dealing with crap latency, provided the quality is good. I would suggest that say 10ms to your ISP PoP is a good start for latency.
The EFF article waffles on at length. It is both crap technical and stolidly political in nature. I think it fails on all levels but I still applaud the basic premise: We all need reasonably decent, low latency connectivity.
Oh, soz, I'm a Brit, but my last point still stands 8)
Here, a provider i use offers variable tarrifs, that allow adjusting download/upload ratio dynamically in web interface (e.g. tarif '250' could be switched between 250/80 Mbps, 150/150 Mbps, or 80/250 Mbps).
Latest iterations (NG-PON2 and XGS-PON) are 10G symmetrical, and XGS-PON is now cheap enough that GPON doesn't make much sense. AT&T Fiber in the US has been deploying it for the last few years.
Seems like you are right! Although most are asymmetric (2488 / 1244 Mbps). I guess that even for ones with symmetric bitrates, effective upstream transfer rate would be lower than downstream transfer rate due to synchronization / higher inter-frame period needs.
What access technology is being used by that provider that you can change the up/down allocation?
I have 50/50 symmetrical, so I guess I can't complain. Nowhere close to gigabit, but always more than enough for my needs.
I must say I’m rather surprised ISP used to just give people symmetrical lines for free.
DOCSIS 3.1 was supposed to also improve the upstream situation, but OFDM upstream is no where to be found yet, as supposedly they have to upgrade all the amplifiers to support more bandwidth in that direction. Most people don't care. They're not uploading tons of files.
I'm hoping to get fiber someday.
There will be a huge simplification and cost reduction, of the computing hardware experience as both consumers and businesses. You will only pay for the computing time you actually use, no idle hardware. And the only devices you will need will be (mostly wireless) I/O devices.
And unlike heavy home desktop or gaming devices, our I/O devices (from touch screens, to keyboards to VR goggles) are very portable. The exception, large screens in hotels etc, will be configured as full computing conduits, not just Netflix streaming.
We will all wonder at the clunky way we each currently manage our inflexible local/individual computing power now.
I'm not convinced symmetrical is the future. I would like it, but even in these days of remote work, nobody cares about their upload speed.
I think it was pretty clear at the time that the "nobody uses it rhetoric" was to get around the lack of upload capacity on the HFC network (High Frequency Cable, otherwise known as cable TV coax for the international readers).
The smoking gun is that you can get 250/50, but can't get 100/100 for any amount of money.
Coming back to the article, Australia is a perfect warning of why broadband requirements should mandate 100/100, and therefore force new builds to build fibre. If congress allows 100/20, then the USA can join Australia in re-spending billions redoing infrastructure over and over again, instead of just getting it right the first time.
If I had xMhz of bandwidth on a communications channel, and the applications I use mean my requirements are skewed in favour of either upload or download, why not allocate more of the available resources to that direction?
It’s an interesting consideration actually, I wonder in future if some, say DOCSIS standard or something, would allow the end user to decide how many channels to allocate for up vs down.
If they are capable of 1/10/... gbps each direction, why not?
here i'm thinking fiber optic and not old copper links
I did a speed test recently and the fastest available speed in a small village near my parents was 8gb/s ! I was amazed, especially considering how hard it is to get 10G networking
Is symmetric Internet common anywhere outside of datacentres?
If and when that is widely available then we'll get equal up and download.
If the up/down split is on copper with FDM then there will always be a question of how to allocate the spectrum to upload vs. download. And mostly, for consumer driven reasons, the standards will skew to give more of it to download.