Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

> However, this was impractical, especially with the shift to working from home during the pandemic with sub-par internet connections. scp always copies full files, there is no "delta mode" to copy only the things that changed, it is slow for many small files, and there is no fast compression.

I didn't appreciate the scope of this problem until a friend of mine visited from the valley. I live in semirural Canada, and they were floored by the speed and low latency of the fibre connection I have.

I sort of took it for granted that people would spend the extra twenty bucks or so to make work from home a painless experience, or at least ask their employer to fund a better connection.

It caused me to reach out, and I found many wfh peers with terrible connections, low powered laptops, and few second monitors. And proper desks? The exception.

My family is mostly in trades, and so spending a little cash to improve my tools felt like common sense. Apparently it isn't.

> I sort of took it for granted that people would spend the extra twenty bucks or so to make work from home a painless experience

I think you took for granted the mere availability of fiber as an option.

30Mbps DSL is the best option I have, other than Starlink. And I live in San Jose!

You're not wrong. It's amazing how poor access can be.

I live in a tiny town on Vancouver Island and I have gigabit symmetric, for a very reasonable price. When I lived in Vancouver that simply wasn't an option.

The Canadian government gives grants to telecoms to install fibre. And I think there is some relation to signing up end users too but I can't recall.

I thought the USG did a similar thing but maybe didn’t require the installed fibre actually be used /connected to the cabinets?

Yeah. In my particular case the utility was already paid to deploy fiber, but they did “fiber to the node” which runs fiber to the DSL station. It’s still copper from there to the house, and in my case (end of the line in a cul de sac) it’s degraded down to only 30Mbps max bandwidth.

But somehow that counts as a fiber deployment :/

Unless the local node is completely saturated, I would expect you should be able to get much in excess of that. If you're ever up at 2 am try running a speed test then.

I'd also try to rule out everything on your side, house wiring, routers, switches. Basically try to speed test it with the line they wired directly to the outside.

And upgrade any old network hardware.

Unless you're talking all they offer is 30Mbps. Then that's an ISP problem.

10/1 (Mbps) is the "guarantee" where I'm at. It's pretty rural, so I'm happy to have anything.

I would pay $200/month extra for fiber.

It still tickles me when people wonder why Starlink is anything someone would want.

The telcos were all given deals with assurances that they would bring rural America to something resembling what their urban counterparts have, but they've remained stagnant for some time now.

Starlink has finally given those people hope of seeing reasonable connectivity options. I would add in that T-Mobile Home Internet, and the likes, are doing so too, but on not as grand of a scale.

I pay $130 AUD a month for 500/50 over HFC. Not ideal price wise but it works well enough, but man the NBN could’ve been so much better.

I could go to 1000mbps, but then I’m limited to 25mbps upload which is just terrible

With who? I'm paying $200 for 250mb from Aussie BB.

Superloop! On the NBN for the infrastructure

I'm starting the process of shifting to Australia (from NZ), and this is going to be the hardest pill to swallow - I'm paying $83 AU for 900/400 currently!

Lol, we have 46Mbps DSL over in Half Moon Bay. My friend in Los Altos sent me his 8Gbps symmetric internet speed test result...

that's wild, my parents in a pop.~ 1000 rural town in france get 2GB fiber; the next "average" town (60k inhabitants) is 30km away, and the next big town (Toulouse, pop. 460k) is 120km away

I am sitting in a farming village in central EU and I have 900mbps fiber, as of last year.

My family lives in old South Seattle neighborhoods and has excellent fiber.

I had something like 100mpbs co-axial 21 years ago in West Seattle.

What is the problem with San Jose?

I think people have been asking that question for generations.

My opinion- Internet providers running cables through public land are a natural monopoly but aren’t really regulated as such in most of the US, where it is believed that because DSL and an 5G cell phone plan exists there is competition.

Bay Area broadband is surprisingly bad, and doesn’t fit the outside assumptions of the “Silicon Valley”.

It’s because of Silicon Valley I think. We all got broadband with the first generation of technology in the 90’s. Since then, there has been so much government subsidies for rolling out internet infrastructure that no telco will invest in upgrades unless there is government money to pay for it. But most of those subsidies only apply to new deployments, not upgrades. We don’t qualify because we already have “broadband” (which here just means faster than dialup). So nobody is willing to pony up the cash for fiber-to-the-home deployments.

It's surprising that it would still need government subsidies to start with. I'm not really into the details of such thing that much, but around here (northern Europe) we're basically getting fiber everywhere, first in cities but later also in very rural and (by European standards) low-population areas, and there are no subsidies involved. Private companies compete and goes to communities (in rural areas) or neighborhoods (in city- or city-like areas) and try to drum up interest, and if there's enough interest they start digging. And in densely populated areas it's a no-brainer, they just do it. Due to competition (just more than one supplier and you have the competition) it's kind of "got to start this area before the competitor does.."

The fiber is also used for TV etc., with several providers on the same fiber, so I imagine that the fiber provider gets income from the competing TV providers as well. Could be part of the why. As for myself, I only need and only pay for actual internet.

I've had 1Gb/1Gb fiber for many years now, and lately fiber arrives in the most unexpected areas (long distances, few residents). It (the deployment, not the monthly) used to be more costly, but it's not anymore. And no public money involved. I know that it used to be, as an experiment, a couple of decades or more ago, but only in certain areas.

This problem is by no means limited to the US. Germany has that problem as well in rural areas and there government is also providing subsidies to expand broadband access.

Sometimes this can even be a problem in cities when the available infrastructure is at the limit. It's quite possible to move to an area, after having checked that good internet is available and suddenly the provider says no when signing up.

Yep! I lived all over the Bay Area for the last 20 years and I never had the option for fiber until I moved to Oakland two months ago. It’s only $40 a month for symmetric gigabit fiber. But before I simply had no option for it.

You don't appreciate the complete lack of incentive for companies to roll out truly high speed internet in the U.S. There is minimal gov't backing, little competition, most people don't know any better and at the end of the day those companies will still have to charge the same amount per month they do now.

Nobody is avoiding fibre because it costs extra, we don't have fibre because it isn't offered. We're not as stupid as you're accusing us of being.

I spend part of my time in a rural area. Only in the last couple years was fiber even available near my house, and then it's a matter of $300/mo on a 3-year contract for 250mbps symmetric, plus the cost of running last-mile from the road to my house.

Thankfully, Starlink came out, and I was able to get like 50/20 for $110/mo on a month-to-month + $500 fixed.

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