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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!).
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.
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.
Right now I only have 4G, and given that I don't have many neighbors but a antenna nearby it works great too
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.