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Comment by thedaly | Hacker News Reader

I wish that countries would mandate symmetrical connections as well. This would open up so much more opportunity for self hosting web apps and allow for decentralized sites, such as peertube, to function better.

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I disagree. The vast majority of people are never going to need or care about hosting a decentralized hoozywhatsit. Mandating technical decisions that cause waste is suboptimal.

You get symmetrical speeds with fiber, but if ISPs could use the existing fiber infrastructure and allocate 75% of the bandwidth as download instead of 50%, that would be a win.

In what way does it cause waste?

You are mandating infra that will never be used and isn't needed.

Well that might be an assumption that it will never be used. Maybe if people had it they would use it?

But also I'm interested in if/whether this builds infrastructure resilience as well.

Would be interesting to see a well-thought cost/benefit analysis there. In America at least given that every ISP without exception is a giant piece of crap, mandating them to do things I'm going to generally approve of, especially if ISPs would be against it since I don't trust them whatsoever.

Anecdote is not data, but I have a fiber connection and I pretty much never use the upload bandwidth I have.

Not today you don't, but imagine the technologies that could take hold if we could take for granted that people have decent upload as well as download. More real-time sharing/collaboration tools and decentralized social platforms would suddenly have a viable platform/market. And I’m sure there are other use cases I’m not considering.

Thank you for seeing it that way, I like to think the same. It’s so sad and disheartening to see such a lack of imagination on a forum dedicated to new ideas in tech of all places. Making better things available just begets things that can take advantage of them. We’d all still be on POTS and dialup if it weren’t for some things pushing the status quo forward and people would still say you’ll never have a use for anything faster!

You say you prefer steak to cabbage, but maybe if you had more cabbage you would eat it? Therefore I think we should mandate 50% of your food purchases should be cabbage.

Maybe if we mandated that everyone buy a hula hoop, people would find creative uses for them. That's not a great way to steer public policy.

Sure but that's also a bad way of thinking about it, because hula hoops aren't useful infrastructure

Maybe if everyone had hula hoops people would figure out ways of making it useful infrastructure? Like attachments that turn them into umbrellas

No we wouldn't so that's a bad idea.

I get where you and others are trying to go with this, but it's just not a good argument and it doesn't translate at all into discussions about public policy. A more appropriate argument would be showing that it wouldn't be worth the cost or potential upside versus awful analogies.

For example, you can talk in abstract about infrastructure resilience for example with decentralized networks or enabling internet services via fast connections. You can't make such an argument about hula hoops. Unfortunately this "I hate everything and everything sucks" mentality is becoming more prevalent.

As the quality of the centralized hoozywhatsits continues to decline, I expect demand for decentralized hoozywhatsits will increase, given that they're harder to parasitize.

I agree that it shouldn't be a mandate though. It would be enough to mandate that the Up/down speeds both appear on the promotional material in the same font size.

How much of the country is truly technical enough to install (and want to install) self-hosted solutions though.

I'm an engineer by day, and even I can't be bothered when google does practically everything I want it to

If you mean setting up a server for each separate thing you want to host--pretty much none of us.

But I imagine it'll be more like bit torrent: Hosting just becomes part of using.

If you don't want to pay for a service, maybe you leave your computer on overnight while seeding and by the morning you've got enough cred to be a premium-tier user.

> You get symmetrical speeds with fiber, but if ISPs could use the existing fiber infrastructure and allocate 75% of the bandwidth as download instead of 50%, that would be a win.

That depends on the fiber access mechanism. GPON is usually 2.4 G down / 1.2 G up TDMA over a shared medium. The downstream direction has perfect synchronization because it's a single sender, but upstream synchronization is more difficult across the many terminals, so they use a lower speed to compensate. I don't know what the common fiber connectivity models are in the UK though.

It’s GPON in most deployments. I think they’re rolling out XGS-PON in some places.

Don't forget about Security Cameras - if you check in on them remotely, that's all upload.

Maybe John Q Public doesn’t want to host his own hoozywhatsit, but what if he starts making VR calls that require uploading massive amounts of data? Or some mesh technology takes off? Or he takes up vlogging?

I don’t like the command-and-control mentality behind traditional one-way media (not saying that’s your mentality). The further we get from that, the better

I can easily envision a future where live 'lidar' scans of your body and face need to be streamed as part of a VR chatroom

It's not like I have a problem with symmetrical connections. I have a symmetrical fiber setup. People who need to upload will choose a plan with it.

I just think _legally mandating that every connection be symmetrical_ is a mistake. Most people don't want or need it.

Then that would be more of an issue at the exchange end. The current issue is that homes are running copper cable and so the cable needs to be changed for fibre to every street.

At least if you start with fibre to the street/house, you can update the backend infrastructure without the customers' involvement

>Mandating technical decisions that cause waste ...

What you mean waste?

The same infra that lets you download, lets you upload.

Also, if only you knew the cost of wholesale bandwidth ...

> The same infra that lets you download, lets you upload.

Not really. The DOCSIS protocol that runs the cable internet and GPON TDMA which runs fiber both dedicate more channels / bandwidth to download than upload.

We could come up with new communication protocols that are symmetrical, but this would lower download speed in order to increase upload speed. It's a physical limitation of the universe we inhabit. That tradeoff is not worth it for most people.

That's a protocol, not a hardware thing so no waste in the physical realm. Also, backbones are nowhere close to exhausting their capacity.

One could even argue that the change in topology to a more distributed network could actually reduce deployment/maintenance costs.

Source: Worked at an ISP for 2 years.

75% download would be fine too. Right now many connections are 90% or 95% or worse, and that is not okay.

They are that they way for a reason. Legacy copper infrastructure only offers so much bandwidth, and customers would rather have most of that bandwidth be for download.

"Most" is fine. I'm not talking about "most" as the issue.

And I'm not talking about copper either. Legacy coax is the main problem. Because it has components on the wire enforcing upload/download splits that weren't designed for modern internet service. If it was installed today (and both upload and download were openly advertised, if necessary), then it wouldn't have such an asymmetric layout. It's not customer demand limiting upload to 10-20mbps. In theory this will get fixed over time, but I want more pressure on implementing the fixes.

Unfortunately ISPs not interested in that, too many legal letters because of file sharing users. So instead they they usually consider it a premium feature that they up-sell to gamers. Imagine how different the web would look like with many users with symmetrical connections, Opera Unite envisioned something like this https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/opera-unite.html

Seems like a really bad idea to mandate that download be no higher than upload. Would just result in few/no plans with high down bandwidth.

Which is fine if you’re also regulating the minimum download bandwidth?

but how does a fiber connection even get affected by a limited upload? it's just an artificial limit in order to squeeze larger monthly fees from the user. it's not like extra gear/equipment is needed to give full speed in both directions.

Passive optical networks are usually assymetric at hardware level

This law is about home networking, which has nothing do with with symmetrical/asymmetrical bandwidth allotted by your ISP.

> Additionally, a new law has been introduced that requires new properties in England to be built with gigabit broadband connections, sparing tenants from footing the bill for later upgrades.

Is this a correction to his statement? Symmetry isn't mentioned here, which could mean they're free to throttle it. Hardware capabilities rarely match service limitations, when money is involved.

All ISPs I've had specifically forbid any kind of servers in the TOS, so symmetric speeds aren't the only problem.

I don't need to run a server, but in the modern era of work from home and connecting to something like S3 to push large files around, that symmetric upload speed is required not a nicety. when you can download a 65GB mov file in a matter of minutes but to push any changes back requires many hours, something is just wrong

agreed. Fiber is the only option for residential symmetric in the US, and those locations are far and few between

Almost all gigabit is already symmetric so this is a concern of the past.

Not the bulk of FTTP connections in the UK, to which this article refers, which run over Openreach’s common last-mile or Virgin Media’s DOCSIS cables. They’re the only National operators offering gigabit, or near-gigabit speeds.

There are plenty of smaller ISPs that run their own fibre and do offer symmetric connections, but the bigger players all off asymmetric connections.

Do you know what makes them asymmetric? Is it just traffic shaping at the ISP, or is it some hardware limitation?

It's not necessarily a hardware limitation (depending on hardware), but the at the physical layer the frequency plan for a DSL or PON connection typically allocates a narrower band for upstream traffic than downstream traffic. GPON is usually 2.4 Gbit down and 1.2 Gbit up across everyone attached to the same optical splitter.

Your comment contradicts itself. You mention a bulk of FTTP connections then mention virgins DOCSIS. I’m assuming you’re talking about their Coaxial cables, if so it’s not FTTP in the first place it will be FTTC.

My understanding is their new fibre lays are all “symmetric ready”, same with BT. You’re right they currently don’t operate them in that fashion, but they’ve laid the groundwork. See below.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/11/first-trial-us...

I'm a customer of virgin's fttp connection, which is converted from fibre to coax on premise - so yes, actual fiber going to your house, but running docsis in some fashion or other

The article you linked covers this as well:

> while more than 1 million of their premises are also being served by “full fibre” FTTP using the older Radio Frequency over Glass (RFoG) approach to ensure compatibility between both sides of their network.

As for them going symmetric in the future: I'll believe it when they do, not holding my breath

This is a choice, by the ISPs, unrelated to the physical layer. It would be nice if it were a requirement.

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