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Comment by cornstalks | Hacker News Reader

It's so great seeing my hometown make progress here. Internet options have always been an absolute joke here.

I think a lot of people are going to be surprised in the near future (once the network rolls out to residents) just how cheap fast internet can be. And many people don't realize just how awful Comcast's uplink speeds are (1 Gb down won't save your Zoom calls if you only have <=20 Mbps up). Bountiful is in for a big quality-of-life improvement for internet users (which is basically everyone).

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I jumped from comcast (whatever, 200 up/20 down or similiar) to 1Gbps symmetrical 4 years ago and now 10Gbps symmetrical. For less than half of what Comcast charges, with a local ISP (Sonic). It just makes you realize how much money is being funneled directly into shareholder pockets (and to lobbyists and congresscritters and local regulators). And then they brag about throwing $100k at some local schools or something.

Gotta make sure those g'ddamned pirates don't have enough bandwidth to seed their beloved cable-network-owned TV shows and movies, at the expense of everyone else who could benefit from faster uplink speeds. ;)

It's almost as if co-operative models of ownership were a vastly superior alternative to joint-stock enterprises :)

Sure, for stuff like this where it's a natural monopoly and it makes sense for customers to be stakeholders.

But there's a reason why co-ops are rare outside of that: why would people work hard without personal upside?

> why would people work hard without personal upside?

Define "personal upside" because people work hard all the time absent a path to power, or even material benefit! Come to think of it, why do people have children?

Humans are social animals and they are deeply moved to work extremely hard for the sake of love, dignity, and respect alone. Contrary to the nonsense picture you paint, humans only lose touch with such desires in the face of hopelessness to realize them.

> Humans are social animals and they are deeply moved to work extremely hard for the sake of love, dignity, and respect alone. Contrary to the nonsense picture you paint, humans only lose touch with such desires in the face of hopelessness to realize them.

This is bullshit, and obviously so. Humans are by nature lazy. If you give people food and comfort, they will work the barest minimum they can to not be bored, and practically speaking, they'll pick an unproductive hobby (like gaming or idle art) instead of the stuff that society needs to function.

People have kids because having a kid is a deeply rewarding experience. Very few people are going to volunteer to work in mines, maintain sewer systems, or farm for other people to eat.

I believe you are being sincere, which saddens me greatly. I hope one day you find your way to a community where the common good is celebrated rather than denigrated. I can only assume that it is a lack of experience that leads you to believe that the world must be so and cannot be otherwise.

> But there's a reason why co-ops are rare outside of that: why would people work hard without personal upside?

"Co-op". It's in the name. Reciprocity? Community? There is personal upside, just not the HN-approved shareholdery kind.

> There is personal upside, just not the HN-approved shareholdery kind.

Enough personal upside to get someone to build you a house? Clean out the sewers? Wake up at 4AM to sit on a tractor and plow a field?

If you think the answer is yes, then why don't you try and get some people to do those things for "reciprocity" that doesn't involve money?

I have Sonic, and I am rather displeased that approximately 1/3 of my total bill (a bit over $75 total) is for the phone line and associated taxes.

The service is great, though.

If the phone line is obligatory it’s just a way of restructuring your bill to make the headline rate look lower. (I’ve not paid for a landline for 15 years.) I’d love to use Sonic but they stopped building out the street next to me.

The bill is itemized, the voice line is $10 and the taxes on the voice line is $15.

If Sonic likes their extra $10 of margin, that's fine, but I hate paying taxes on a service I don't even want! Keep the money but give me an option to decline the voice service.

It's wild to me how you people are like "I don't mind if private business fucks me up the ass a bit but gash dang if that gubmint so much as kisses me on the cheek I'm gonna lose my shit".

If we could harness energy from cognitive dissonance, this site could power us-east-1. To be fair though, I've only seen a bit of masked capitalism defense here, and no one outright trashing municipal/coop options. I'm oddly optimistic lately, as the state of things continue, some consciousness seems to be becoming inevitable.

To be clear, my ire is entirely with Sonic.

They're lazy scheme to pad their margins nets them 1x but costs me 2.5x.

I'm not making a statement on government or taxes.

Maybe it depends on the area, but it's no problem to get service w/out voice here.

> (1 Gb down won't save your Zoom calls if you only have <=20 Mbps up)

1080p Zoom HD only calls for 3.8Mbps. A 20Mbps up connection should be just fine if it's truly 20Mbps up.

I have a couple coworkers on StarLink who can only get 20Mbps up on a good day. Zoom is still fine.

Can't say specifically for Zoom, but I do know that during the pandemic lockdowns, with me on Google Meet or BlueJeans, and my two kids on Teams for their school, our Xfinity 500Mbps service really struggled, and going to their Gigabit service was needed. ISTR that 500Mbps had 20Mbps up and gigabit had 30Mbps, but I might be off there.

Switched to city fiber as soon as it was available and that's been a blessing.

Sounds like your local exchange couldn't cope with the additional traffic rather than your line.

Yea that upgrade caused something else to happen, because like OP said 20mbps of actual bandwidth will support 3-4 people on Zoom,Netflix(non 4k!),gaming just fine.

You probably got a different modem, with more channels, that opened up more actual bandwidth for you.

That's true, I did upgrade from a 3-4 year old DOCSIS 3.0 Surfboard to a 3.1 Surfboard at the same time. I didn't run any metrics to see what actual bandwidth usage was, I was just waiting for symmetric gig fiber at the time.

A significant amount of issues that people have with cable internet is the bad modem/router combination the ISPs ship.

Outside the US coax based internet is rarer (its fibre or copper) so there isn’t a lot of good modem/routers.

So if you can’t get fibre, get an Eero or similar and at least replace your router.

The actual issue which is often blamed on routers/modems is that DOCSIS can be horrendously overcontended, especially on the upstream. It can really vary depending on the CMTS you are on, which means it can change street by street. When the upstream is contended your TCP ACKs get lost/delayed which absolutely hammers performance.

When people replace modems they often get an upgraded one that can support more/better channels or DOCSIS versions. These new channels usually are much less contended (as only a tiny fraction of people have them at first), so it seems like a huge improvement, then as bandwidth demand grows and more people get new modems which can support the additional channel it begins to degrade.

However, I would say that with DOCSIS3.1 and DOCSIS4.0 you are starting to get to a point where there is so much more capacity available and bandwidth growth has slowed down so much you are starting to see a lot less capacity problems IMO.

I was thinking the same. I've been working from home on a rural DSL connection for the past 6 months. 10mbps down and 2mbps up. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but Teams calls do seem to handle it surprisingly well.

> if it's truly 20Mbps up.

I agree, though "if" is kinda key. And the number of concurrent users in your household. It can be easy to accidentally saturate your uplink if you have multiple users in your family and you aren't coordinating. Or at least that's been my experience.

You can setup QoS on your router. It avoid all those issues.

you're right, there also are some other network parameters on the side: latency (ping time), packet loss and jitter.

needless to say, they're often overlooked.

Comcast’s upload is so bad that they don’t even bother advertising a minimum upload bandwidth. Zero mention of upload capacity anywhere.

It could be 5Mb/s split over 200 households for all you know.

They do publish numbers in a very hidden page: https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement

This page isn't accurate to their new upgraded infrastructure (mid-splits, DOCSIS 4.0) they've gradually been rolling out over the last year or so. Currently only available in certain areas and limited to their rented xFi modems, but it increases speeds to something like 50 down/50 up, 100~900 down/100 up, 1200~2000 down/200 up.

Edit: You can see these new speeds listed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/wiki/knowledgebase/...

I don’t trust Comcast and coaxial technology to actually deliver close to that if multiple people in the neighborhood are using. As far as I understand, Comcast splits a small amount of bandwidth between a ton of homes, and then applies QoS based on how much people pay. If you buy the 200Mbps up tier, then you might get 200Mbps up for a little bit as a “burst” speed while they take away from the rest of the neighborhood, but not continuous.

If it was comparable to fiber, then they would advertising the upload prominently like fiber ISPs advertise it.

Fiber is not immune to this problem either. You 48 10gbps homes might share a single 20gbps bonded uplink on a switch.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I want to add a quote that I found very informative

> If you're given the choice between a low bandwidth private connection, or a small share of a larger bandwidth connection, take the small share.

From http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html

You are not being serious right? That article is discussing the realities of 90s internet

oversubscription ratios for consumer isp's are typically in the hundreds.

and mostly that is fine because wifi is also involved which will domniate any availability or service quality metrics.

Theoretically, yes. Practically, the fact that no coaxial cable internet prominently advertises upload bandwidth leads me to believe there is far less upload bandwidth available than fiber networks.

Almost every network uses Statistical Multiplexing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_time-division_mult...

I hate that you have to use their modem. I already have a D4.0 modem, just let me use the new speeds.

Who needs 20Mbit/s for Zoom? Are they sending 4K UHD from a pro DSLR?

My ISP (cable modem) was around 25Mbit/s down, 5Mbit/s up in the before times, and they've rapidly upgraded speeds a few times since the lockdowns, but mine's been max 20Mbit upstream, and no complaints. I've used every app there is for realtime meetings.

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-Zoom-sys...

Zoom recommended 3.8Mbit/sec. Most third parties recommend 5. 20 is ridiculous, and will allow for 3 of your kids playing Fortnite and Netflix all day while Dad's in meetings.

You aren't just at the mercy of your housemates, at peak times 20Mb can drop to 1Mb easily. Advertised speeds are a theoretical maximum.

I suppose that my ISP has some really great backbone service in my area, then, because dropouts and "peak hours" mean nothing to me.

"640K [of memory] ought to be enough for anyone."

If you want to send a copy of your camera stream to everyone on the call from your device directly for lower latency...

That is not how Zoom works today...

AFAICR, Teams was still single-plexing like this as of ~2 years ago. I wonder if that has changed.

You can never apply the "____ is more than enough" theory to technology. Remember when DSL felt as fast as driving a Ferrari?

This assumes this is the only traffic on your network. Nowadays it's never true.

Also I'd guess most people's network has mote than one user at a time.

4+ kids in a family is pretty common in Bountiful. Some I know have more than twice that (my own is >4). During COVID everyone would be in calls at the same time (school for kids, work for parent(s)). People are back in person now but we still have snow days occasionally.

So yeah, 20 Mbps up can really suck, especially when you realize the advertised speeds are only "up to."

4+ kids?! They don't call it Bountiful for nothing.

There are a lot of Mormons in Utah, and Mormons have a lot of kids.

Surely 4+ people in simultaneous FHD calls is a corner case, no?

School online was video conferencing for each kid on their own devices.

Remember that Zoom became popular during Covid. Another less recent but massively popular thing is TV streaming.

The point is: it’s a thought error to look at what is mainstream today to determine the potential of tomorrow. It’s akin to dismissing cheap electricity based on that we already have enough light bulbs.

Fast reliable internet is infrastructure, which is not exciting on its own. However, if widely available, new downstream opportunities open up that otherwise nobody would be foolish enough to invest in.

But most importantly, it’s not expensive for being infrastructure. Americans in particular are already overpaying insanely for internet.

do you work for comcast?

I'm sending 4k video from a moderately priced camera, sometimes to large conference rooms with a big screen and 4k projector.

> Who needs 20Mbit/s for Zoom?

No one cares about "needs". We want maximum bandwidth and zero limits on its use. We'll figure out what to do with it.

I'm on board, but if 10-gig costs $500/month, I'm going to have to reconsider. 100 Mbit (symmetric) for $40/month is a bit closer to what my budget can handle.

> "Internet options have always been an absolute joke here."

Yep. You can totally thank the totally corrupt and pretty much borderline criminal Comcast and Centurylink (and their bribe-hungry pet politicians) for that.

It gives me some hope that perhaps my city could do something similar.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+advocate+for+communit...

Don't be too hopeful. You might live in a state that passed law banning municipal internet.

https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

Some of these hurdles and requirements are unbelievably ridiculous and so obviously manufactured by the ISPs that I can't believe anyone seriously thinking it has anything to do with taxpayer protection or whatever they're making up... As a non-US citizen, I am so frequently perplexed at how you can, at the same time, have so many smart, hard-working and enterprising people in your country, and so deeply relinquish your freedom, choice and quality of life to either hyper-capitalism, or just idiotic politicians (usually both in connection)...

Once corruption becomes pervasive it’s really hard to get rid of.

> 1 Gb down won't save your Zoom calls if you only have <=20 Mbps up

while i agree with you, i just want to make everybody notice that almost no video-chatting application let's you lower your video quality or resolution.

I might be perfectly fine to stream a 640x480 version of me, it's not mandatory to always stream a 4k version of me.

I wish more video chatting application would allow for resolution and quality selection.

There ought to be a way to force the camera hardware to use a lower resolution.

remove/disable the stock camera, use a USB webcam

https://helpdesk.kentfieldschools.org/en/support/solutions/a...

https://athelp.sfsu.edu/hc/en-us/articles/360051867154-Using...

[disclaimer]

i am one of those who destroys integrated OEM cams by default, to replace with the peripheral version.

The link you posted only show how to pick the second camera, not how to force them to a lower resolution though

this may help you if ur windows:

How to access webcam settings in Windows [win10]

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-access-webcam...

How to change the webcam settings on Windows 10 or Windows 11 [2022]

https://www.onmsft.com/how-to/change-webcam-settings-windows...

You sure on that? We have 1000/100. Both WFH using zoom etc, 4 nest cams etc recording. We very rarely break 10-15mbps up.

Meanwhile I live 2km from Google's headquarters and I can't get more than 20mbps up.

Part of the reason is I can't afford to own here (nobody can) and property owners don't want to upgrade either. Same with EV charging.

Places like this should require property owners who rent out their properties to get with the beat or leave. Property managers who don't install gigabit fiber, EV charging, and induction stoves aren't welcome in this community. This is Silicon Valley, not Utah, yet the Utahans have us one-upped already.

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