Cord Cutting Is Hitting Comcast Harder Than Ever | Hacker News Reader

Cord Cutting Is Hitting Comcast Harder Than Ever

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22 pointschazeon11 comments

Verizon and T-Mobile both have their 5g home services available to me. Prices for both are acceptable (30 for Tmo and 50 for Verizon). Speeds were meh, at around 200 Mbps down and 20mb up.

Comcast is definitely sweating because they gave us a speed increase about the same time Verizon opened up their 5g service.

Heck I have a sever closet where my equipment rests. I did both tests inside with no direct LOS to the tower and it still worked very well.

If I wasn't married with a wife who also works from home with me, then the 5g home service would be more than sufficient.

200 mbit down & 20 mbit up is meh for a household of two?

I'm in a household of four (two adults, a 5 year old and a 9 year old), and 100/20 seems to be fine for us. For more money we can upgrade to gigabit (its fibre), but haven't bothered yet because I don't really see the need to pay that extra money. If I started to feel it was necessary, I would.

I'd consider that meh for a household of one.

You clearly are not a comcast customer in the same service area as me.

We all work from home and are both tech workers moving lots of data so unfortunately upload speed is a big deal for us. Sadly there's not a lot of options for us.

I work with +1 PB datasets all day, two tech workers working from home, and I even stream to Twitch without a hitch for the same speed.

Move the heavy lifting "lots of data" out of your home network into your works network. Seriously, do your network portion on their provided network.

Can even run cloud gaming via 25 mbit down & 2 mbit up. There is no reason to bring corporate data into your home network.

>Verizon and T-Mobile both have their 5g home services available to me. Prices for both are acceptable (30 for Tmo and 50 for Verizon).

"Is there a data cap on the T-Mobile Home Internet service? Nope! There are no data caps on our 5G Home Internet service."

Comcast has a datacap right?

When I am working from home, either in my chief tasks as low-bandwidth web browsing or the occasional Zoom meeting, there are zero radios between me and the backbone. I'm on the government connectivity plan which covers 100% of my $30/month bill. I'm granted access to Metro WiFi hotspots everywhere I go that my ISP has a presence (and that's everywhere I go.)

Now WISPs want me to cut my cables and put at least two radios in between me and the backbone? That's a literally ridiculous prospect. Turning these cables into radios will, I guarantee, reduce the reliability, the bandwidth, and the privacy/security of my connections. What is the upside? I ask you, what upside from this?

Line of sight radio is much more reliable than a Rube Goldberg machine made of big wooden sticks and high tension wires. It’s also fewer network hops (ideally, just one) if you have a good WISP.

Having said that, the best and worst ISPs I’ve ever had were both WISPs.

The only reason WISPs are a meaningful market presence in urban markets is because we completely whiffed the opportunities to regulate internet service early on.

We could have taken the Chattanooga approach (municipal broadband) and gone national with it, giving us Romanian-level connectivity in every city bigger than 200 people.

We could have actually held private broadband firms accountable to subsidy terms and buildout requirements, and there would still be enough fibre that we'd regularly trip on it when walking to the Kwik-e-mart.

We could have used similar unbundling rules for cable as applied to DSL and we'd at least have competition on prices, caps, and ToS rules.

Instead, we're going for WISPs because it can be deployed with minimum external consent. T-Mobile doesn't have to fight legal battles with cities that made guarantees with the cable companies over territories, or dig up everyone's yard to run the cable that should be there in the first place.

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