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Comment by podiki | Hacker News Reader

Japan's internet infrastructure, at least in Tokyo where I lived for a bit, is amazing. Most buildings were wired up with fiber (this is ~2011) with 100 Mbps up/down pretty standard and cheap (~$30/month at the time I think). Pretty sure you had 300+ speeds available then too. The fiber is from the national telecom, with dozens of ISPs for your actual service, and email etc. if you wanted it. My apartment had a switch somewhere too I realized, with each room having an ethernet jack. Needless to say, it was rough going back to the US after that.

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Seems like it depends on the city and state. I have symmetric gigabit backed by fiber in a suburb, and most of my friends out in the boonies have the same.

I dream of a world where symmetric 100 is $30/mo everywhere though!

I'm sort of in a very rural area. Farm fields across the street from me. But I'm also ~5 minutes or so away from downtown.

I have available to me gigabit (down) from Comcast. I had it for awhile and it was glorious but it was also $80/mo on promo and $110 when not. The reason I got it was not for the download speeds, it was the faster upload speeds that came along with it. Still slow, and not even remotely close to speedy. But it was a solid 12mbit up. Compared to the 5mbit up I get on my 100down plan.

I would kill for some reliable upload speeds. It's awful anymore just sending images to people, never mind you want to send a quick minute long video to someone and it takes several minutes to send.

Any network engineers around? What leads comcast to offer such lopsided connectivity? I mean having some sort of asymmetry is normal and somewhat justified, but usually were talking something like 1:10 upstream:downstream. Here parent comment has fairly extreme 1:83 instead!? I imagine there must be some reasoning behind it, but I just can't figure what that would be.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but DOCSIS over coax isn't full duplex. It's multiplexing send and receive over the same wire. Since download bandwidth is more important they provision their network design to maximize the amount of downstream bandwidth available. They also have an extreme level of oversubscription.

My understanding is that it’s not a technical issue, but rather a business and marketing one. Comcast doesn’t want the home service to compete with their costlier Business service, so they artificially limit the upload speeds to prevent home/consumer users from serving a high volume of content using their less-expensive service.

The last mile DOCSIS bandwidth is shared among all of its user. So you want to maximise the download which is used 90% of the time. The problem is somewhat solved ( or lessen ) in DOCSIS 4.0 Full Duplex Extension. But as with everything DOCSIS the lead time to market is extremely long.

I believe, but am not a network engineer, that more channels of the system are dedicated to downstream and the standard prioritizes it.

Municipal Fiber is the way to make that happen. It allows ISPs to offer very cheap rates, since they do not have to provide the infrastructure. I live in a building connected to a municipal network, and pay $32 Canadian for symmetric gigabit.

I currently (temporarily) live in the boonies (3 hours north of SF in the woods) and Starlink can't be available soon enough.

I'm renting office space in town where the best I can get is a 40 Mb DSL line because I can't get anything other than HughesNet at the house. More than a few days of SSH over satellite will make you want to regret the day you decided programming would be a fun profession.

Forgetting about the latency for a moment, even though HughesNet advertises nice speeds, it's very much the same "speeds up to" crap most other ISP do. They're so oversubscribed that you can barely browse the internet in the evening most of the time.

Starlink works well (got it for my in-laws place in Placerville). It was a little rocky early on with more frequent dropouts, but now the dropouts are rare and the speeds are fast: 50mbps to 200mbps and this is with the dish being slightly obstructed by a tree.

In SF though I'm in a webpass wired building and have 1gbps up and down for ~$700/yr or ~$58/month.

On the Peninsula Comcast had 1gbps down and 35mbps up, but they also had a (very expensive) Comcast Gigabit Pro plan that was 2gbps down and 2gbps up with a second 1gbps down/up line included too and a fancy switch also. Hard to order though and the reps don't know about it. Cool that it's available though.

I never ended up getting it, but I wrote up some details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comc...

You can't even get symmetric gbit in most of San Francisco :(

I am in rural part of Bellevue (Greater Seattle Area), and we have symmetric gbit from Ziply. Works like a charm, but lacks IPv6.

I'm sorry but there's no such thing as a rural part of Bellevue. Regardless of however not-dense your particular area is you're still close to a major population center.

shrug everything is relative.

About 50% of SF has above ground wiring and Sonic offers 1gig symmetrical in those neighborhoods at a reasonable cost.

hm, I have this but Sonic still doesn’t service me

Vietnam’s internet infrastructure in big cities is quite impressive too. If paid in advance for an year, you could get 100 Mbps up/down for ~$11/month. There are several ISPs competing with each other so the speed goes up, the price goes down every few years. High speed fiber internet is commonplace. Higher speed is available too.

The only downside is that some websites are blocked, or slowed down at some points.

$11 = 250426 đ

Parts of the US are catching up, but it is distributed very unequally (and often much more expensive).

Anecdotally, I moved into a newish (~5 year old) apartment building in Seattle and had my choice of three ISPs that each provided symmetrical gigabit for around $60/month, delivered via an Ethernet jack in a low-voltage cabinet in my closet.

Getting it wired up took one phone call, wherein my switch port was activated remotely and I could grab an IP address and start using the internet. IPv6 via DHCPv6-PD and everything else worked without a charm.

On the other hand, where I live in (also Seattle) is served by exactly one ISP via DOCSIS, providing 1000/35 but nothing more. It can vary block by block here unfortunately.

In my neck of the woods, it's all about competition (or that lack there of). I went from 100mbps down for $130 to 300mbps down for $60. What changed? A new ISP in town offering 1 gbps for $100.

If we wanted what other countries have for internet, then what we need is to make the lines public and have ISPs rent them from the government. The reason ISPs can create these duopolies is because every new company has to invest a LOT of money to lay down new data lines. If a company already has their cable/phone lines in place then boom, captured market.

Rentable public data lines would make the cost of setting up new ISPs a LOT cheaper.

I had the same issue ("1000/35" with Xfinity but in reality it was barely 10/1) but keep checking because CenturyLink is regularly bringing fiber to new areas. For the same price I can get 1000/1000 symmetric now.

CenturyLink wired my entire neighborhood a number of years ago, but it looks like _before_ my house was built, and they haven't come back since.

All of my neighboring blocks have 1g/1g from them, but the most they offer at my address is a 40/40 "fiber-based coax" internet that I'm probably not even wired for. I would love for that to change - my DOCSIS internet has been pretty solid, but I miss the gigabit upload.

can I ask which Seattle area ISP offers IPv6 via DHCPv6-PD

Definitely!

Wave G (NOT Wave's coax-based DOCSIS that they bought years ago) offers/offered IPv6 via PD, lots of documentation for it around the internet: https://gist.github.com/dmtucker/cf3f241cf002367825633c988ff... (this isn't me).

I haven't been a Wave G customer in a number of years, but I don't anticipate it's changed since ~2018

.. is that supposed to be amazing ? I had 100mb in a medium-sized french city, Montpellier, in 2010 (apparently existed since 2006: https://blog.ariase.com/box/actualite/article-833-noosnumeri...) and gigabit fiber since 2012 in Bordeaux.

Right now I'm at my parents in a small 1000-inhabitants village (closest "large" city, Carcassonne, 45k inhabitants, is 30km away) and they're getting 2gb fiber installed next week.

Compared to the US, unfortunately, it is. I have Verizon FiOS in a major metropolitan center and only get about 200MB both ways. And that's not even the base plan, that's an upgraded plan.

As with most things like this in the US, the cause is privatization of things that should be public utilities and unchecked monopolistic behavior. In most places you have exactly one choice in internet service provider, so they give you what they give you at the price they ask and you deal with it or you don't have home internet.

And in 2011? Forget about it. I had crappy copper-wire DSL in 2011 and was glad for it.

I remember I recently did speed tests on the free wifi that they offer throughout Tokyo and it was always around 100-150Mbps u/d (I came across this clip when looking to verify[1]). It is kind of disheartening that they offer comparable internet speeds for free from old telephone booths that people in the west can pay over 50$/mo for even in large cities.

[1]: https://clips.twitch.tv/SourDreamyButterflyOSsloth

For 2011 it was quite something.

But I wonder how it looked e.g. in Romania at that time, they had pretty nice fiber infrastructure because they didn't a lot of the old cables, and in 2015 I read that they had 500 Mbps links (not sure if symmetric) affordable.

And in Poland I'm currently paying ~20 USD/month for 1Gbps up / 300 Mbps down (I got it 2 years ago). 4 years ago I had 300 Mbps / 30 Mbps for similar amount.

This is in suburbs of a bigger city (not capital).

So, here's an incredibly annoying thing about the fiber situation in Japan. An apartment building can advertise that they have high speed fiber internet, if the fiber is run to the building. They don't actually have to provide high speed to the apartments within the building.

My building was advertised this way, and my apartment has 30Mb ADSL, because that's how the complex was wired when it was built.

nyc has fiber with 300/down for $40/mo now....

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