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Comment by nixgeek | Hacker News Reader

At least in PNW the service isn’t 900/40 any more, it’s advertised as “1.2Gbps” and the profile actually seems to be 20% over that, I’ve seen 1.5Gbps or 170-180MB/sec downstream performance recently. Upstream is still <= 50Mbps and otherwise agree with your comment that the U.S. is falling behind in price-throughput on domestic internet services versus many other developed nations.

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There have always been regional variations in this; I've had the same 1.2GBps plan in a few states now and it only ever got close to that number in the one where Fios was an option.

Comcast's only innovation in the last few years has been to add data caps to residential fiber service (my 300mb/s "1.2 GBps" is capped at 1.4TB/mo).

We’ve just been paying a $30/mo upcharge for unlimited data (removal of overage charges). Basically because it’s more predictable than the $10 for every 50GB overages. A few months we’ve had 4-5TB through the service and Comcast doesn’t seem to have slowed us down or charged more.

Let's please not further the idea that it's acceptable to quote only downstream speed when citing Internet speeds.

Doing that just leads to 20 more years of Comcast killing the concept of modern Internet service for Americans. Cite both numbers.

I consider only symmetric speeds real internet.

It's sad how difficult it is to get symmetric speeds in some parts of the US. Around here, the cable company was actually lowering upstream speeds for some users. They raised their downstream though. This was an attempt to encourage them to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1, I think. Once enough users upgrade they can start doing fancier stuff, like allocating more upstream channels. Maybe by 2030.

Upstream on cable like that will be sub 50 Mbps because they're very intentionally only using a small number of rf channels on the coax for upstream. This is why in my opinion docsis3 is putting lipstick on a pig and is only a short term stop gap solution. The better end state is proper SM fiber to each house.

Yep, even DOCSIS 3.1 modems don't do much for upstream, since generally it remains at 3.0. They have to do physical upgrades, such as amplifier swaps, to actually add more channels and make DOCSIS 3.1 OFDM upstream possible. That seems like years of work, and won't happen any time soon.

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