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Comment by throwbadubadu | Hacker News Reader

> 4 of us on video calls was bringing Comcast gig service to it's knees, I imagine because of the limited outbound bandwidth...upgrading to 10gig

Huh, what? Stop imagining and do the math with numbers, maybe Comcast is shitty in general and other metrics.. but still doing here regularly 2 concurrent video calls with sometimes Netflix on top without any issues... on 50 Mbit still! (also asymmetric btw, I may be undemanding, but so a bit wtf on reading that)

(Or Comcast cable internet? There is often more bandwidth sharing involved than they tell, especially upstream, or what does gig service mean?)

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Comcast gig is 1gb/s downstream. I don't know what the upstream rate is and they avoid mentioning it, but based on my experience with them I could see 4 video calls being enough to choke it. It's hard to really appreciate the symmetric data rate until you really start using some decent upstream traffic, then it becomes a day and night kind of difference.

In Greeley (30 min southeast of Foco) max upload with 1gbps is 20mbps.

In Chicago it was typically 40Mbps but in the last few weeks my scheduled speed tests are running 230Mbps. However, during Covid I had co-workers that lived in communities with a large number of WFH and they were all having trouble with video conf on Comcast so it doesn't surprise me at all.

Upstream from Comcast 1gbps plan was 15mbps when I had it.

Thankfully I’m now in a building with Google webpass that has 1gbps symmetric (and no data cap) - much better.

To pile on the examples, I had a Comcast connection in SF that was 1gbit down, 5mbit up during covid (based on regular speed tests and what little I could glean from the plans without being the account holder). With 6 people in the house juggling video calls there was definitely some audio only days when schedules clashed.

I still don't get all the downvotes.. if Comcast is selling "gig service" and you only get thst little upstream that is hilarious even in the most extreme asymmetric scenarios...

If you now have symmetric 1 gig is more than enough for any private use, why would one consider 10 gig for home?

> why would one consider 10 gig for home?

For the sheer crazy joy of it!

As if human wasting is not already enough, got it :)

It depends on whether or not they consume more as a result really - think about it, is the number of joules to transmit down a wire different at different speeds? I'd guess probably not

It wasn't that serious... and still need to process 10-100 gigabytes files for work sometimes, and am doing fine with my 50 Mbits... I just cannot imagine one person really.making good constant use of 2.5 Gbit, and in the rare times needed not just invest a little time, so I think it is money wasted in this case. Admitted, my imagination may be too limited and it is a valid tradeoff of time vs money.

But yes, nitpicking, but on the same tech it should be insignificantly more joules also, different techs or hw much more significant though.

As others have said, it is the outbound that was really killing it. Sure, we could watch multiple Netflix, but streaming our camera video and audio and it'd get flaky. ISTR I had 250Mbps inbound at the beginning and outbound was ~25Mbps. Upgrading to gigabit got us the fastest outbound they offered at the time, I think it was 40 or 50Mbps. Also, as others have said, Comcast really doesn't like talking about the upstream speed. When I got the upgrade to gigabit, I did their chat support to ask them and even when their support people were directly asked they were reluctant to say. ISTR they kept asking why I wanted to know.

I'm on Spectrum with 1 gig down, 25 Mbps up. It's not difficult to saturate my upstream.

Back when we had 100mbit down with comcast, it couldn’t reliably stream at 3mbit.

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